I am treasurer for a charity that runs about 60 activity groups. Each activity group has a volunteer leader who administers the group, arranges venues etc, collects fees from group members which they pass to me for bank lodging, and advises me of any payments to be made. Currently I record the activity group's financial data on spreadsheets. The volunteer leaders maintain a memo of their accounting data but it rarely agrees with my spreadsheets and sometimes the group ends up running at a deficit. I'm searching for online accounting software which, as well as maintaining the general financial records of the charity, will allow the activity leaders to log in to have read-only access to their relevant group's financial data but not allow access to any other groups figures. Each activity could be treated as a department and the volunteer leader as a department head. As a charity our finances are limited. Thanks for any help.
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How many folk need access?
If you are strapped for funds it’s probably a bad idea expecting all of them to have access to cloudy stuff, due to the costs involved, ie adding users.
Will any of them actually know what they are looking at anyway?
Surely it’s better and cheaper to get right what you are using now. Why are there discrepancies?
Realistically, that kind of thing will cost many thousands - and is in the realm of medium sized business requirements.
If you can get your data right, is there something you can produce with pivot tables and stuff - ie a set of data as a PDF for each venue?
It sounds a bit of a faff - but I can't see you getting what you need for the money you probably have to spend/.
Realistically, that kind of thing will cost many thousands - and is in the realm of medium sized business requirements.
This ↑
OP - what's your budget ? If "not a lot", you're going to need a serious rethink.
is there an excel based solution?
Work book held on line in the Cloud
Such as a work book with 60 plus tabs.
one tab per dept head.
All tabs not relevant to the individual are deeply hidden and pass word protected.
Some Vba code required to open hidden tabs en_ masse and automate certain procedures.
All sheets have a common template.
Only Finance Officer may amend.
The finance officer has full view of all tabs
pivot table or power query and power pivot can be readily applied
in turn the clean accurate data could be formatted to export to financial software
VT Final Accounts ( not cloud) could help, there is a Charity Template mentioned on the VT website.
Perhaps the Excel Aweb gurus have a neat technique they could share
As far as an Excel based solution is concerned, it depends on the level of security you want. Assuming you want to keep each group's data confidential to that group, Excel is not your friend. Passwords are useful for stopping the innocent or preventing accidental changes but are in no way secure. They can all be easily bypassed with the exception of a password to open a workbook.
If you can use a pivot table with your data and set the groups up as a filter, you can then use the Pivot Table option "Show Report Filter pages" to create a separate sheet for each group. There are utilities which will allow you to export each sheet in the file as separate files* which could then be distributed (you will need utilities to do that as well if there are 60 groups to avoid going mad).
Of course the pivot table bits will not be needed if you already have the groups on separate sheets.
*Edit: Including as pdfs to address the read only point.
As a start, it might be worth finding an alternative to the leaders collecting fees and passing them onto you (from a security and accounting point of view). Could you set up a central payment portal?