Treasurer

ACL Treasurer Duties

Kathleen F. McCoy Last Updated: 1/18/05

balance the ACL accounts against bank statements

I keep the ACL checkbook in Microsoft Money. Priscilla must be given the money file to update periodically. In addition, she keeps records of all deposits etc... in local excel files.

Note: we keep a number of accounts and all must be updated. Sometimes this involves getting information from the EACL and NAACL treasurer.

Each item in the check book is given a category (and sometimes subcategories). The treasurer should keep an eye on the categories and give guidence to Priscilla with respect to their appropriateness.

A few times a year the treasurer needs to get these files and the bank statements from Priscilla, update money for any checks written by the treasurer, and balance the accounts against the statements. This needs to involve identifying each of the deposits (for example) against the files that Priscilla has provided and/or on-line registration/membership files.

Information from Plug-N-Pay (online credit card payments) can be gotten from their website (Priscilla can provide the specific site and the username/password).

Online membership/registration database can be accessed through Navicat (Priscilla can provide the specific instructions for logging on to that). The software is producing an access database. Navicat allows various files to be exported (personally, I spin off excel spreadsheets).

As part of this process, the treasurer may identify money that needs to be moved, or develop better practices for keeping the accounts or better practices for running the organization.

Report findings to ACL exec (and membership).

Oversee ACL Conferences

The treasurer plays a large role in ACL Conferences.

- provide prototype budgets to general chair who will fill in the budget for as many of the costs as s/he can.

- CURRENT TASK TO BE DONE: make general prototype gotten from Jean (the bookkeeper) into something that could be passed along to the next conference chair (this means change many of the entries into formulas, and add a place to play with the fees). Perhaps this is something Priscilla could work up to doing -- it means being pretty good with excel.

- work with the budget provided by the general chair, update it appropriately, change it to better reflect the situation, and, in negotiation with the conference committee, determine conference fees.

In determining conference fees there are several principles - try to keep them as low as possible - determine a conservative figure for estimating attendence (including late and on-site attendence) - come up with a fee structure that will allow the conference to break even given those numbers - my practice is generally to have as many of the participants choose early registration as possible. To help this along, I generally set the late and (especially) on-site fees much higher than early. This is because the attendence is very difficult to judge if we have many people registering late (and especially on-site). The number who do this is significantly smaller when there are big price increases.

- Many policy questions concerning the conference involves money, so the treasurer must pay attention to almost everything concerning the conference. (And must be aware of ACL policies.)

- Work with the conference committee to get the on-line registration up. We have a long-standing relationship with Chris Pennington from AgoraNet Inc (penningt@agora-net.com) who has been putting up the registration pages for each conference (and the membershp form too). He needs to be given all of the necessary information and he sets up the actual page, hooks it to the payment site, and establishes the registration database. This all needs to be tested by as many people as possible before going live (frankly, getting people to seriously proof read and test out these pages is difficult -- and mistakes are difficult to fix, so this can be more time consuming than one would think).

- Monitor on-line registration to make sure there are no surprises (and to make adjustments as needed).

- After the conference, verify the attendence figures against registration income and refunds. (This is a difficult step and requires the registration records, Priscilla's records, and the bank statements.)

- Make sure all conference expendatures are recorded in money and are correct against the bank statements.

- Turn final numbers over to bookkeeper for final accounting. Generally there are a number of questions that come up at this point, and they need to be attended to (or, you need to oversee Priscilla's responses). Oversee the bookkeeper to make sure calculations are as expected.

- Report to ACL exec.

Maintain ACL Shadow Accounts

Shadow accounts (for the most part) must be kept separately and are not reflected in the bank accounts (this especially with sigworkshops at conferences). Separate files are maintained for the ACL shadows (especially the sigs). These must be updated with spending/income from the sigs.

The chapter shadow accounts should be kept by the chapter treasurer (but this only works to a certain extent). The ACL treasurer is responsible for overseeing the chapter shadows. The issue in the shadows has to do with conference spending/income. Generally the specific accounts earmarked for the chapter shadows, are not healthy enough to handle a whole conference. Thus our practice has been to do that spending/income from the main ACL accounts, the chapter treasurer is then responsible for doing the accounting for that conference (though the ACL treasurer has been verifying the registration income for the NAACL conferences which have used the on-line registration software), the accounting then needs to divide out the SIG numbers, remainder is credited to the chapter account. The whole process must be overseen by the ACL treasurer.

-- Handle all ad hoc questions that come up from SIG representatives/Chapter representatives/general membershp that involve funding/registration.