When I took over as treasurer...there wasn't much to the budget, and most of it was on the computer, a simple spreadsheet in Excel. Now that we had a big fundraiser and have money in the account...and with a new school year, I wanted to track the funds differently. I looked at the PTO Today's software...the school won't approve the purchase. What are others using to track? anything to share in file download? thanks

I used to use Quicken, it worked pretty well but I did my reports in Excel, Quicken's reports are not very good. I use Finance Manager now and it's awesome!

When you say "The school won't approve the purchase", what do you mean? Is your group independant or under the umbrella of the school's control?

The reason I ask is because we did switch to the PTO Manager and I love it.

PresidentJim

We use Quicken to track the bank balance and expenditures. To do the tax returns, I export to Excel. I think if I were better at Quicken, I could set up the categories better so it would be easier to do my returns. The IRS wants things classified differently than we report to the membership: eg, our "school store" (pencils, paper, etc.) is run by a different volunteer than the "school logo merchandise" (t-shirts, etc.), but the IRS considers them both "sales of inventory", so I should probably set up a Quicken category for "sales of inventory" and put "school store" and "merchandise" as sub-categories.

If you haven't used any computer system in the past, I suggest you use PTO Today's Finance Manager. I've used quicken in the past, but like the others said, quicken has its limitations, especially in the report layouts. And there are so many features in quicken or MSMoney that a PTO DOESN'T need, that it can be very confusing to learn the basics that you do need. Excel is nice for tallying and adding, but you have to build your system from scratch, and you still won't have a complete accounting system. Finance Manager has just the stuff a PTO needs.

You must get your school to approve the Finance Manager purchase - it's very easy to use and is a good accounting package. Keeping financial records on Excel is an accounting "no no" (I have an accounting degree and that makes me very nervous.) Our prior PTO did that and we never knew what money was flowing through the books. Also, Finance Manager is much cheaper than Quick Books or any other Non-profit software out there.