Best way to record Scout subscriptions and event payments in QuickFile?

Accounting
1

We’re a Scout Group with 100+ members and are looking at using QuickFile for our bookkeeping. We are currently using Excel sheets and a rather manual process for recording all the account, it is also open to error with linking payments to events.

We have two main types of income:

  • Subscriptions: Each member pays £11 per month. Ideally we’d like this to be set up as a recurring payment/invoice rather than manually creating something each month, Ideally the Invoice links to a Family rather than an individual member and we create a recuring invoice per member
  • Events: Members sign up for camps, trips and other events. An event might cost, for example, £150, with a £50 deposit followed by one or more further payments. Members currently pay by bank transfer. We generally give the parents a reference, say Camp26\Surname, when they pay via bank transfer; ideally, these auto-link to the event.

The challenge is that we don’t want to create a separate QuickFile invoice for every member for every event. For example, if 40 members attend a camp, we’d ideally like to record the £6,000 of event income while still being able to identify who has paid, who has a balance outstanding, and which event the payment relates to.

We’re therefore trying to understand the best way to structure this in QuickFile.

Would you recommend using Projects, tags, recurring invoices, sales receipts, or another approach?

In particular, we’d like to know how others handle:

  1. Tracking individual event balances/deposits without creating an invoice for every attendee.
  2. Allocating bank-transfer payments to the correct member and event.
  3. Reporting on the total income and expenditure for a particular event.
  4. Keeping the QuickFile accounts tidy without creating hundreds/thousands of invoices each year.

Any advice from other organisations or Scout groups using QuickFile would be really appreciated.

2

How could you track this without having individual invoices?

3

That was the question really: is there a way to speed up the process of creating 40 invoices for an event, so its not a massivly long task

4

Hello @coreyspeed

Probably the quickest way I can think of is importing the sales from a spreadsheet.

You would need these as a minimum

  • Issue Date *
  • Client name * [Must exactly match any pre-existing client or one will be automatically created]
  • Description *
  • Total gross amount

I assume you have a list of the clients attending the camp
You can copy down the description and amounts (assuming amounts are the same)

Once imported, select all the invoices > Options > Update Tags and assign a project tag so you can see an overall balance for the project/event.

Hope that helps

5

  1. Keeping the QuickFile accounts tidy without creating hundreds/thousands of invoices each year.

You don’t need to be scared of creating invoices. The invoices are how you keep your accounts tidy.

Some thoughts that might help you:

For your monthly subscriptions, your choices are really:

  1. Create a recurring invoice - and then match each payment as it comes in to the correct invoice. (This is what I recommend, because then it’s easy for you to go to the member’s account and see whether they’re paid up or not.)
  2. Give each member their own number to use in the bank reference field. Create a bank tagging rule that automatically detects that number in the bank reference and creates the invoice based on the payment coming in. (This way speeds up your bookkeeping, but gives you zero oversight into who’s paid up and who’s not. You’d need to click into each of your 100 members individually and look at their payments (you could filter by amount to see just the £11 ones) to see if they’re paid up. It also won’t catch the error if someone types the wrong reference number.)

And some general thoughts:

You can enter your customers as “The Smith Family” etc, if you want to track by family instead of individual.

Tags and projects are the same thing. You create a tag and you can see the reports and lists of sales invoices and purchase invoices under Reports > Projects.

QuickFile sort of doesn’t have the concept of sales receipts that other software does. Every bit of income will show up under Sales invoices. You can create these either by going to Sales > Create an invoice, or from the bank feed tagging (where perhaps it’s referred to as sales receipts, I don’t remember), but ultimately you get the same sales invoice for it either way.

In particular, we’d like to know how others handle:

  1. Reporting on the total income and expenditure for a particular event.

Use projects (tags).

The answers to all your other numbered questions are to use invoices, and not be bothered about having the appropriate number of invoices that let you track who owes what; that’s literally what invoices are for.

And for number 2: you go through your bank feed and click “tag me” on the transaction, and then match the payment to the correct invoice.