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By the treasurer of this charity: Mission Possible UK
I am the treasurer of a small charity and had been using another Money software
to manage the accounts.
However I started having problems with my software back in December which I now believe to be linked to having too many standing orders set up (150 in all).
It
therefore became rather urgent to find alternative software and so I searched the internet for software that would provide similar facilities to my current software and eventually came across Bank
Genie.
The process of importing my Money database was made very straight forward by Bank Genie and I very quickly had my records set up.
Most of our charity income comes in small donations
by standing order from some 150 donors so the ability to set up standing orders that would post transactions into the cash book each month was another great facility offered by Bank Genie.
We
generate funds for admin purposes by deducting a proportion of each donation and so each donation is split into two elements. Although Bank Genie allowed manually entered transactions to be split
into different elements it did not have this facility when setting up standing orders. However as a special favour to me this facility has now been added and is working well.
Many of our
donors are tax payers so we are able to get them to sign Gift Aid Declarations and then recover tax from HMRC. It is important therefore to us to be able to identify who the tax payers are and Bank
Genie offers a tagging facility whereby a tag can be added to each transaction that qualifies and then used to produce appropriate reports.
Within the charity we have a number of different
projects that donors can support and the Bank Genie categories and subcategories that can be attached to transactions allow me to manage these. Each project is allocated a sub category and as Bank
Genie allows the recording of both debit and credit transactions, the credits are used to post income and the debits to post expenditure for each project.
The Bank Genie reporting facility is
quite comprehensive, allowing different styles of reports (e.g. summary or detail) and also a range of selections to decide which transactions are to be either included or excluded. The ability to
either print a report or export it (say into excel) is also a very useful feature as is the ability to drill down any line of a report and see the individual transactions that have been
included.
Reconciling bank statements is carried out in a different way to my other Financial Software but now I am used to it I feel it is just as effective.
There are many more
facilities in Bank Genie which I am not using but may be of interest to other users.
I would certainly recommend Bank Genie Pro to anyone wishing to keep tabs on the finances of a smallish
charity.
Note:
The feature to allow Split Standing Orders to generate split type transactions is now a standard in the latest version of Bank Genie Pro
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