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:
- Tracking individual event balances/deposits without creating an invoice for every attendee.
- Allocating bank-transfer payments to the correct member and event.
- Reporting on the total income and expenditure for a particular event.
- 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.