FleurDeLis

I'm definitely going to build on some of these. Thanks for sharing!

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.

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?)

Volunteered as Troop Treasurer in a moment of weakness - troop was at risk of losing our charter without one, and no one else would step up. Last few treasurers were CPAs, but I'm just an organized scout mom and was assured that was enough. I was told there wasn't much of a commitment; I would just need to keep track of incoming and outgoing funds and update scout accounts regularly, also I would need to run reports before each quarterly committee meeting. The extent of the position transfer was being handed a few boxes of files - including months of undeposited cash and checks (!!!) - and getting my name on the bank accounts. Also received a flash drive with the "current" files - "Some things are in QuickBooks and some are in Excel." I'm feeling like this is a nightmare - I don't have QuickBooks (nor any of the software QuickBooks data can be exported into). The info in Excel (the scout account stuff) is not helpful and honestly makes no sense in how it is configured. There are plenty of printouts of equities and liabilities and depreciations...things I do not know the first thing about tracking. And somehow I have to have them all nice and neat in a pretty report for a committee meeting in 10 days. WHERE DO I EVEN START? I have been told to avoid QuickBooks as it is truly for CPAs, but I can't find solid info on how to set up Quicken for a troop. Poring over the internet for the last two days has gotten me nowhere - is there honestly no gold standard for software/web or cloud-based solutions for scout troop accounting? Our troop used ScoutBook, but it doesn't appear there is a financial component there. The single PDF that the BSA offers (under Program Tools) is not going to work (what is that, anyway?) . Should I look into Troopledger? Should I try to start from scratch in Google Sheets? Honestly, ANY light any of you could shed would be helpful! I truly want to be able to do this for the troop, but I am terrified at this point.