You said yes at the AGM. Somebody handed you a memory stick, a bank card and a folder that smelled of the church hall, and the chair said the committee meets again in three weeks. You have one evening to get your bearings before then.
This is that evening, from the kitchen table. It is not a training course. It is the order of things that stops a new treasurer from spending the whole night hunting for a password or a receipt.
The first evening checklist
Start with the bank. Log in to the account, or ask whoever holds the card to read you the balance. Compare it with the last statement in the folder. If the statement is from March and today is October, look for the gap. Note the balance and the date. Do not change anything yet.
Next, find the last agreed figures. For a sports club or a Scout group, this is usually the set of accounts approved at the previous AGM, or the income and expenditure summary the outgoing treasurer presented. Write down the closing balance and the date it refers to. That number is your starting point, and everything you enter later has to build from it.
Then make two short lists.
The first is what is owed. Arrears from members who have not paid subscriptions. Invoices sent to a hire company or a sponsor that have not been paid. Deposits held for a booking. Put names and amounts beside each one, even if the list is rough.
The second is what is held for a purpose. A PTA might have a playground fund that can only be spent on the playground. A church might have a roof appeal. A Scout group might have a grant that came with conditions. These are restricted funds. If you mix them into the general balance, the committee will not know what is free to spend, and an examiner will ask about it.
You will not finish the lists tonight. You only need to know they exist.
Decide where the books will live
Most inherited books arrive as a spreadsheet. It may be a good one. Often it has a tab called "Final FINAL", formulas that only the previous treasurer understood, and a column of totals that does not quite add up to the bank.
The usual problems are predictable. Nobody can explain a formula that pulls from three other tabs. There is no record of who changed a figure in March, or why. Receipts live in a shoebox and the spreadsheet refers to them by a date. When an independent examiner asks you to show the trail from a bank payment to a line in the accounts, you spend a weekend reconstructing it.
You do not have to decide tonight whether to keep the spreadsheet. You do need to decide where the books will live from now on, so that the next entry goes in the right place. One shared place with a clear history is easier to hand over than three files on two laptops.
A simple setup in Vasker
Vasker is bookkeeping and Gift Aid for unpaid UK treasurers of clubs, charities, PTAs, Scout groups and CASCs (community amateur sports clubs). It keeps the cash book, members and claims in one place, and produces a handover pack for the next volunteer. It is a web app with an App Store and Google Play client and an install option, but the cash book needs a connection. Do not plan to run it somewhere with no signal and expect it to catch up later.
To start, you create the organisation from the sign-up page. It takes a few minutes. There is no sales call and no setup fee.
Start on the Free plan, which gives you a starter cash book with one fund. That is enough to enter the opening balance from the last agreed figures and see whether the numbers hold together. If the club needs more, Standard at £59 a year adds full books, members, subscriptions, reports and grant matching. Plus at £119 a year adds Gift Aid and GASDS (Gift Aid Small Donations Scheme) claim tooling and examiner access tooling. Check the plan details before you pay, because what your club needs depends on how it takes money and whether it claims relief at all.
Every account uses two-factor authentication. That matters because the login is now yours, and it should not be a shared password written on the back of a card.
Start free: create your free account, then enter the opening balance from the last agreed figures. Leave the funds and members for another evening.
What to ask the previous treasurer before they leave the room
You may only get one chance to ask questions face to face, so ask these before the previous treasurer goes home.
Who holds the Charities Online login? If the answer is "it's on my phone", find out now whether that phone is coming with the role. Charities Online is HMRC's service for Gift Aid and repayment claims, and a login nobody can recover is a real problem at claim time.
Where are the Gift Aid declarations? Ask whether they are paper, scanned, or inside a spreadsheet. Find out how many there are and where the oldest one sits. General information on this: HMRC expects Gift Aid records to be kept for at least six years. Check current HMRC guidance for your club's situation, because the rules on declarations and what qualifies are specific and this is general information, not tax advice. Do not assume that membership fees always qualify, either.
Which funds are restricted? Ask for the names of the funds, what each one may be spent on, and whether any grant has conditions or a reporting date.
Also ask which bank accounts are open and who can sign for them. A church or a PTA may have two accounts with different signatories, and the new treasurer needs to know which is which before the next payment is due.
Write the answers on the back of the first agenda you were given. You will be glad of them in three weeks.
Leave a note for your successor from day one
This is the habit that makes the next handover easy. Create a short note on the first evening and add to it every time you learn something new. Keep it to one page if you can. Record the Charities Online login holder and where the credentials are kept securely, the bank accounts and signatories, the restricted funds and their rules, where receipts and declarations are filed, and the date of the next year-end.
If the note is up to date, your handover in a year or two is a folder with a list in it, not a scramble through a shoebox on the night before the AGM. Your successor will thank you, and so will the examiner.
You said yes at the AGM. Tonight you only need to get the bank balance, the last agreed figures and the two short lists down on paper. The rest can wait for the next evening.