As the treasurer of my local FRC team, I am looking to move away from strictly using Excel into an easy to use accounting software. Would be very interested to see what has worked well for other teams. Appreciate the input!
We have been using Wave (https://www.waveapps.com) You can get a free account. I am not directly involved, but our accounting is done by a CPA, and he is OK with it. Actually, we are migrating from old Wave to new Wave currently (upgraded version with no direct migration).
We had QuickBooks online for a few years, but it was expensive and cumbersome and we ultimately went back to using spreadsheets.
Has anyone used Mint?
I’ve used Mint for personal expenses, not necessarily for keeping track of team funds.
5499’s purchases are usually done through different people buying materials then requesting reimbursements. This is where using Mint doesn’t really work for us, as Mint relies on the individual bank accounts to track expenses. It makes more sense for the team to use Excel.
I’ll confess up front that I’m the wrong guy to ask. I was treasurer of my church for a couple of years and did it all (donations, pledge tracking, federal donation letter tracking and generation, operational expenses, about a hundred budget lines, several dozen specific purpose account tracking) in excel. I even had excel generate postscript files to overprint on our check templates, pulling data from the payables tab (I did have to manually tell one of the cells which check to start). Of course, all monthly and annual reports needed by the parish and diocese were automatically generated. OBTW, I’ve never figured out Excel macros; this was all formula based.
OK, geezer moment of privilege - anyone else out there who spent more than a few days with the postscript “red books”? Feel free to respond by PM if you don’t want to admit it publicly, or clog this thread.
At the other end, if you do decide to stick with Excel, feel free to PM me some questions and examples; always willing to help.
If you are not an accountant and you are setting out to build an accounting system for your organization, one of the first steps (after you’re done kicking yourself for getting into this situation) is to consider whether you think in terms of cash basis accounting or accrual basis accounting. This decision will shape how your system works.