volunteer treasurer

I spent the afternoon grappling with the garden club accounts.  They are not conceptually difficult, but I haven't yet got into the rhythm of how information is supposed to flow through them, even though I ought to know as I wrote the spreadsheets.  Members pay their annual subscriptions and then pay extra for trips, using cash and cheques, and I need to keep track of who has paid what for which event, when some physical payments cover more than one visit, or a visit plus the annual membership, or two different people's tickets for the same visit, and make sure that all the payments on the Trips page of the spreadsheet makes it through to the Income page, and that the Income page reconciles with the bank statement.  The Membership Secretary has taken some of the subs straight to the bank or the post office herself, which saves me a trip to Colchester, and she is very good about giving me a breakdown of what she's paid in that tallies with the totals on the bank statement.

Only it took me a long time this afternoon to work out that I was missing the breakdown of two of the February payments into the bank, and as it's the first year I've done it I'm not yet familiar with most of the members' names and it's not immediately obvious how many there ought to be or whether some must have fallen off the list.  And when you pay in several batches of membership fees all of eleven pounds you end up with two subtotals for the same amount and start to go mad trying to keep track of which is which.  The paying-in book has room for only ten cheques per slip, there is no carbon copy, and the bank statement doesn't include a paying-in slip number, so if I don't keep a clear record of which payments went on each slip and write the totals on the stub I could spend hours fiddling with possible permutations of cheques trying to get them to fit with the amounts that arrived in the bank statement.  It didn't help that I forgot to take the paying-in book with me to the bank and had to ask the desk clerk to write me a receipt, and she made a transposition error in one of the totals.  The Membership Secretary had only just got back from holiday on the other side of the world and was severely jet lagged for the first committee meeting of the year, and the second one was reduced to an exchange of emails by the snow, so I feel I am still finding my feet. 

The difference between a number and a transposition error of that number is always divisible by nine.  It should have been a clue.