On 8/25/2019 3:25 AM, Michael Hendry wrote:
First (and an important question)
Is your organization om the cash or accrual basis? You should
always state that. The business features of gnucash only work for
accrual. And I see that your organization does pledges. Here in the US,
pledges ARE receivable,but only according to the terms of the pledge <<
thus if a person pledged X a year for five years, only the X for the
current year due NOW >> So pledge accounting will require extra work
unless all your pledges are simple, immediate pledges.
But you can easily have a second set of books to keep and report on "by
member" stuff, and if using the business features, can invoice. Note
though that at least in the US "membership dies" are not really
receivables <<you are legally allowed to drop out of a voluntary
organization at any time -- organizational rules about "demits", etc.
apply only if you want to rejoin>> However many organizations even cash
basis [prefer being able to send out "statements" (invoices to members)
Notice that I misunderstood.What I was suggesting was if you had to
supply to the government the CORRECT member name for the donations, not
just that it had to be SOME member's name. The latter is of course far
simpler in terms of record keeping << I was picturing the former because
possibly there were by person limits >>
Michael
PS: I do NOT attempt to get gnucash to produce reports in their final
form. Easier to export full reports and then copy into a document that
gets edited to remove extraneous detail, insert annotations, etc.
On 24 Aug 2019, at 23:03, Mike or Penny Novack <stepbystepf...@comcast.net>
wrote:
On 8/24/2019 5:39 PM, Michael Hendry wrote:
This is for the Gift Aid claim. We have to put in an annual claim to the
taxman, identifying each contributor and his/her total amount donated during
the year. Many UK charities use this method to boost their income - for
example, when you pay the National Trust for Scotland the admission fee for one
of their properties, they’ll ask you if you’re willing for them to make a Gift
Aid claim and take down enough details to make that claim. You have to have
enough income to be taxed at the basic rate, and the charity can claim tax back
at a rate 25% of the admission fee.
I have to account for the income as it is received, and I’d prefer to record
sufficient detail in GC at that point, rather than run a parallel record on a
spreadsheet or whatever.
Regards,
Michael
OK, I think I understand now. And it seems straight forward to implement in
gnucash, though you will an easy way to suppress the detail on most reports.
When your organization has money come in for any purpose, that is a debit to
cash (or some bank account) and a credit to some income account. Could be a
split to multiple income accounts. Follow so far?
So in your income tree, one item is "donations". Under that you have an account for each donor. A FULL "statement of
revenues and expenses" << gnucash name Income Statement but I gave it the usual title a non-profit uses; a for profit
says "profit and loss" >> shows the detail (total for each donor. But usually you would probably want to suppress
that. You could try a dummy placeholder (say named "donors") in between donations and the individual donor accounts and
try hiding that subtree when producing the report for the governing board who might want to know the total of all donations but not
how much from each whom.
Michael
PS: So a typical transaction for an event where person A "rounds up" as a
donation.
debit
cash X
credit
dinner share X - Y
donor A Y
It’s actually a little simpler than that, because a nominated cashier collects
X from each member at the door but only has to pay X - Y to the venue after the
meal, passing Y to the Charities Account.
We have chosen to label this income “Charity Choice” - two members are selected
at the end of the year to nominate their favourite charities to receive the
proceeds.
Thus I have:
Income:Charity Choice:MemberA
Income:Charity Choice:MemberB
etc.
Visiting members from other Rotary Clubs are charged in the same way, and (so
far) I’ve recorded this income in the parent account (Income:Charity Choice),
but there might be an argument for accumulating this income in a generic
non-member child account (Income:Charity Choice:NonMember). We don’t claim Gift
Aid on the latter.
My difficulty is that we have several other buckets in which we accumulate
income from members during the year, so I need:
Income:Bucket1:MemberA … MemberN
Income:Bucket2:MemberA … MemberN
etc.
From time to time during the year I need to report on the total contents of
each bucket, and once a year I have to report each individual member’s total
contributions to all buckets. I think that using the Business Features might
ease these two reporting requirements in that the Income buckets wouldn’t need
all these child accounts and each member would have all bucket contributions
recorded in his own customer record. This would also allow me to record
commitments to contribute to any particular bucket at some point in the future
and report on these via Accounts Receivable.
Having no experience of the Business Features, I may not be seeing the elephant
trap concealed in my path!
Regards,
Michael
--
There is no possibility of social justice on a dead planet except the equality
of the grave.
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