Tips for new volunteer treasurers

Petrified or pleased — you’ve just been voted in as a volunteer treasurer at your organisation’s annual general meeting. Whatever you’re feeling, this is your first time and you’re probably wondering, “Now what?”

Well, a little “housekeeping” is your first task. The following three activities are easy, so will help you settle into your new role and build your confidence at the same time.


Arrange a Handover
Schedule coffee with the outgoing treasurer to swap important documents and chat about your role. This includes:

1. Handing over the accounts, cheque books, receipt books, invoices/receipts for purchases, bank statements, budgets, reports and any other relevant documents.
   
2. If your organisation uses accounting software, get a tutorial on how to use it, including passwords.
   
3. Handing over a treasurer’s or financial procedures manual, if your organisation has one. If not, you can create one when you’re more familiar with your role — this will add value to your organisation and future treasurers will breathe a sigh of relief!
   
4. Discuss any unfinished business, such as due bills or income, and any spending commitments or expected income that isn’t in the latest budget.
   
5. Ask questions! This is your chance to discuss any worries, have accounting concepts explained or get trouble-shooting advice. Grab the outgoing treasurer’s contact details for future reference.

Change Bank Signatories
Your organisation probably has a rule that two or three committee members, including yourself as treasurer, must sign, and thus authorise, cheques and bank withdrawal slips. These are called “signatories” and, chances are, you won’t be the only new one — other committee roles probably also changed hands when you were voted in at your annual general meeting. So you need to update your bank’s records of who these people are, which is as simple as picking up a form from any branch and then filling it in. The signatories will probably need to go to the bank with the form and show 100 points of identification too (if they are not already customers of the same bank).

While you’re at the bank, make sure your bank statements are issued monthly and cover the entire month. It sounds strange, but some banks start statements from the date an account was opened, not the beginning of the month. Setting up your statements as we’ve suggested will make doing reconciliations so much easier.

Get Organised
Start as you plan to continue — getting organised now will give you a clear picture of what you’re doing and set the tone for your tenure as treasurer. It will also save many hours of late night hair-tearing and rummaging through a mess of paperwork. Hopefully your predecessor was just as diligent as you’re going to be, which means you can leisurely go through the accounts, checking everything is filed correctly and familiarising yourself with what’s required at the same time. If not … well, hopefully you like filing because you’ve got a bit of work to do!

These tips were extracted from the Volunteer Treasurer Survival Guide and are provided with permission from Admin Bandit.

Westpac Internet Banking

A Westpac Community Solutions Account is accessible via internet banking and is ideal for not for profit organisations with multiple signatories to simply receive and make payments. This tailored solution is FREE to set up with no monthly service or transaction fees for activities such as BPAY, Direct Entry, and cheque and branch transactions. If you’re paying a bill without BPAY using online banking you would use the “Pay Anyone” facility at $0.25 cents per payment. That’s cheaper than a postage stamp and envelope!

To open an account for a community organisation you’ll need to provide either:

• a certificate of registration/certificate of incorporation for community groups; or
• an ATO income tax exemption certificate; or
• a Memorandum and Articles of association stating ‘not for profits’ status, or
• Meeting Minutes.

For internet access you’ll also need to set up Business Online to allow multiple signatories (with various authority levels available) to access accounts and transfer funds online.

To start paying bills using Westpac internet banking just follow these simple steps:-

1. Open a Community Solutions account (remembering to provide one of the items listed above to open the account);
2. Each signatory provides 100 point identification (if they are not already known to Westpac);
3. Complete a Business Online form, outlining the number of signatories;
4. Each signatory is allocated an access level and a userid/password;
5. The treasurer logs in and creates a payment;
6. It sits in a Pending List waiting for authorisation;
7. Another signatory logs in with their userid to authorise the payment (assuming they’ve seen the invoice you’re paying);
8. The payment is then automatically submitted when it is authorised (if only two signatories are required for example).

To set up an account for your community organisation, simply visit any Westpac Branch and talk to a Business Banker.

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