FleurDeLis Posted February 3, 2018 Share Posted February 3, 2018 Well, I'm our new troop treasurer, against my better judgement. The outgoing treasurer was an accountant, but a bit negligent tbh. I am not going to use the mess of QuickBooks that was left for me, I am planning on simplifying and hopefully using Excel or Google Sheets for all of the finance tracking - both to keep things more transparent (something that's been missing) and to make it easier for someone to take it on when I am finished. We do have ISAs, but that's easy enough to track on Sheets. What I'm looking for is a spreadsheet that can track the big things - checking account, events, all of the outgoing and incoming money. Scouting boards have lots of mentions of "we use a spreadsheet"...any chance anyone is willing to share their template with me? I don't want to take too much time re-inventing the wheel. I haven't yet met with our committee, and I plan on asking them, but I'd also love to know what your committee's treasurer provides to you at meetings, and in what kind of format. (Also, I am trying not to be frustrated with BSA or my local council, but I honestly can't believe that there's no standard software or widely-accepted processes for handling money within troops. Literally every Scouter I've talked to says their troop tracks finances differently. How is this not a class I can take at PTC or something?) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pselb Posted February 3, 2018 Share Posted February 3, 2018 Any time I have done books for an organization, I ask what they want and then develop an Excel document that easily gets to that. I use Excel for everything I want to track. All my grading (I'm a teacher) is done with Excel and any organization I worked for I've done the same thing. Get a copy of the current report, create a tab of just that report. Everything else done on other tabs totals into that singular report. The Report Tab is what gets printed off for the meeting. Anyone needs to see detail, that is a print out of the tab in question. In my case each student's grades are accumulated on an individual tab and then referenced by the class roster tab and that tab is in the format the school wants and I just print it off at the end of the quarter and turn it in. If a parent wants to see the progress of their child, I go to that child's tab and it's all there. I print them out for Parent/Teacher Conferences. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ItsBrian Posted February 3, 2018 Share Posted February 3, 2018 https://www.scouting.org/programs/boy-scouts/program-planning-tools/ There are spreadsheets that can be edited for packs/troops for budgets. Hope it helps! 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ItsBrian Posted February 3, 2018 Share Posted February 3, 2018 I also found one that many seemed to like, you can probably easily change it to be used as a Troop spreadsheet. https://www.dropbox.com/s/xauvw78j932bkax/!Finance_Spreadsheet 201x.xlsx?dl=0 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
FleurDeLis Posted February 4, 2018 Author Share Posted February 4, 2018 17 hours ago, ItsBrian said: https://www.scouting.org/programs/boy-scouts/program-planning-tools/ There are spreadsheets that can be edited for packs/troops for budgets. Hope it helps! This document is what I was talking about when it comes to BSA not having a system in place. This is fine for a yearly budget - but there are no guidelines or established system for how to track each scout, how they've paid and for which event, what we are paying vendors, who needs to be reimbursed and for what, storing scans of receipts and emails, how to process donations, how to ask for money that hasn't been paid, depreciation and replacement of equipment ... I could go on, but you get the idea. I'm looking for a streamlined way to organize the nuts and bolts. There's a lot of money flowing through our troop, and I'm surprised there's no standard app for making sure all troops are good stewards of their funds. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
FleurDeLis Posted February 4, 2018 Author Share Posted February 4, 2018 17 hours ago, ItsBrian said: I also found one that many seemed to like, you can probably easily change it to be used as a Troop spreadsheet. https://www.dropbox.com/s/xauvw78j932bkax/!Finance_Spreadsheet 201x.xlsx?dl=0 I'm definitely going to build on some of these. Thanks for sharing! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ItsBrian Posted February 4, 2018 Share Posted February 4, 2018 1 hour ago, FleurDeLis said: I'm definitely going to build on some of these. Thanks for sharing! I found it on the scoutbook forums, maybe you should look there for other advice! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pselb Posted February 4, 2018 Share Posted February 4, 2018 These spreadsheets seem to be an overwhelming, complicated, overkill. How much did we take in? Total of fundraisers and other sources of revenue. How much did we spend? Total of vendor expenses, reimbursements, and activity costs. A detailed accounting of those issues should suffice. Income Tab - Left row title Fundraisers, columns of each project to enter in the amount Left row title Other Income, columns of income sources Total at the bottom: total income Expense Tab- Left row activities, column of amounts such as travel expense, food expense, registrations, etc. Total at the bottom: total expenses Report Tab- Beginning balance from previous report Plus Income from Income Tab Minus Expense from Expense Tab Ending balance for the report The detail collected from this system should be able to quite accurately be the foundation for the next budget. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
blw2 Posted February 5, 2018 Share Posted February 5, 2018 https://www.troopwebhost.org/ I would not have done the treasurer job without it, period. Even if the troop did not want to use it for the other tools, I would have insisted they keep it or find another treasurer. It's set up to log everything in for you. Payments can be made through the site (seamlessly with paypal), it's a tool like quicken in a sense to balance your checkbooks and accounts. It has lots of budgeting tools, but I recommend against a lot of that. It's a layer of complexity that simply is not needed and will amount to busy work. keep it simple. It has great tools for sending out balance statements to scouts or parents, that sort of thing...tools for printing various reports for the monthly committee meeting, you can drill in to see reports from events (camping trips, fundraisers, etc.... to see the money... parents and scouts can log in to see their individual situation and I liked that it gives complete transparency. Any committee member can be given permissions to either view or to edit the money stuff, so they can log in any time they want to see what I'm doing. An online spreadsheet (such as google sheets) would do this too, but it more complicated and apt to and then the other things....troop emails, newsletters, calendar, etc.... we found the newsletter doesn't get read for the most part, folks don't really log in to sign up for events, stuff like that..... and personally I think a lot about it looks a bit dated and maybe "clunky", but it was still a good thing. The guy that operates it was a troop treasurer and he has it set up well I think. We used it with "scout accounts"...the idea is that every troop member has an account. They put their own money in, and can choose to maintain a positive balance that can be used to pay things like camping charges or for dues... It's their money sitting in the troop's bank account. the site just breaks it out really nicely to show what their balance is. It wasn't scout accounts in the sense that fundraising money from the troop goes to the scout personally like payment for doing the work. thats' a whole sticky wicket that a lot of troops used to do, probably many still do, but should not be doing. So if a scout owed money for an upcoming camping trip, I would charge their account. It would show as a negative balance if they didn't have enough in to cover it. worked pretty well overall..... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KelseyS Posted February 28, 2024 Share Posted February 28, 2024 (edited) @ItsBrian, any chance you might have that spreadsheet still and be able and willing to share it? Edited February 28, 2024 by KelseyS Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
madrivereric Posted June 10 Share Posted June 10 For one of my Woodbadge tickets I made a pretty comprehensive unit financial tracking spreadsheet tool which keeps track of unit finances and helps promote good fiscal practice. It tracks cash on hand, money on deposit with a checking account and council as well as tracking reimbursable expenses (e.g. parents buy something for the unit and the unit them pays them back) as well as unit sold items (unit buys something, like pinewood derby cars or scout books and then resells them at a future time). It also has the ability to assign expenses to different categories for budgeting/financial reporting. The spreadsheet works on nearly any spreadsheet (Excel, open office/open docs, google sheets, etc.) and all of the formulas are documented. It has some sanity checking to prevent most errors and the spreadsheet is segregated into data fields and formula fields. If something gets messed up with the formulas, one can simply recopy the data into a fresh sheet and they're usually back in business. It uses a check book like entry method and usually folks find it pretty easy to use. I've gotten good feedback from non-financial folks as well as financial professionals. Link to spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1rbKRRKE7jhgWSCuPMHHMjxCy82k5Ge7aAjcMZcoRPxM/edit?usp=sharing Eric Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RememberSchiff Posted June 11 Share Posted June 11 @madrivereric welcome to scouter.com Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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