Voluntary work question

superwizon

Hi everyone

I hope somebody can help me.

I am currently doing some voluntary work as a treasurer for a charity. There are local support groups and we each have an individual bank account, but the way payments are made is that I send an invoice to head office, they send out a cheque from the charity'd main account and then deduct the amount from our group bank account.

We keep the accounts on spreadsheets, and as it is I write in the amount at the time I send off the invoice (or a couple of days later to allow for postage), then when I get a bank statement I do a reconciliation to check which payments haven't come out yet. However, I just got an email from head office telling me that I have to leave any payments off the accounts until they have come out of the bank account as the closing balances on the bank statement and accounts have to match. To me this doesnt make sense, what is the point in keeping accounts if you are just going to amend them to whatever the bank statement says? And also this makes it hard to keep track of monthly expenditure as one month we will have no outgoings then next month a payment of £800 or so will come out because they have taken all the payments for the last few months out of our bank account in one go.

Can someone tell me if I am doing it right or if I should just do what head office says.

Also, what counts as work experience towards becoming a full member?

Thanks

Nps

It's funny you say that, as I've just taken over as treasurer for a very large national charity and they do exactly the same thing. To be fair though they've told me that I can do it however I like so I'll be adding my invoices/payments when I pay them, not when they've cleared. Surely that's why you do bank reconciliations?? There'd be no need otherwise.

The spreadsheet I use has an extra 2 columns with a Y/N to say if the payment has cleared, and another one to show what months statement it shows on. That way I can keep a record of all payments, cleared or not, but use formulae/filters to only show cleared payments if that's what head office want.

MarieNoelle

Hi,
to answer your question re: work experience, I would record the number of hours a week/month you spend on this and it should count as part-time experience towards your full membership. When you record this on your AAT, they will then calculate your experience pro-rata.

CeeJaySix

Is that not simply a cash accounting system as opposed to an accruals system?