5 Questions Your Treasurer Is Going To Ask You

Once you’ve decided that Member Jungle is the right option for your club, you are going to need to pitch it to your club’s committee. One member of your committee who will have many questions in particular is your club’s treasurer. Your treasurer isn’t just going to have a lot of questions; they are also going to have a lot of very specific questions that might be hard to answer if you don’t know where to look. 

So, in order to help you out with this, today, we are going to cover the five things your treasurer is going to ask you. 
 

 

How Do We Receive Money For Online Transactions?

Okay, so you tell your club’s treasurer that with the Member Jungle system, you can accept online payments for member dues, event tickets, merchandise and more. Then they say, “Okay, but how do we actually get paid?”

It’s an important question and one you will definitely get asked, so let’s get to the answer.  

How Do We Invoice Members For Their Membership Dues?

This is going to be a really easy question for you to answer, and your treasurer is going to love the answer too.

With Member Jungle, you won't have to manually invoice members for their annual fees anymore. The system will automatically send email reminders to members as their membership expiration dates approach. Members can renew their membership and pay their fees online when they log in. The system will then update their account with a new expiration date, send them an invoice, and mark them as a current member without your treasurer needing to do anything. You will receive an email notification once a member has completed their renewal. 

Additionally, members can log in to their accounts anytime to view and access their invoices. This system will save your treasurer and bookkeeper a lot of time and effort so that they can focus on more important tasks.

How Do We Access Transaction Information For Accounting Purposes?

There are a few different ways your treasurer can get all the transaction data they need for tax and reporting purposes, and they are all pretty straightforward. 

Export Data Straight Into Their Accounting Software

Using Member Jungle, you can easily export all your transaction data straight from your Site Payments report and import all your transactions into Xero. This CSV export file is also compatible with other accounting software like MYOB and Quickbooks. To find out more about how to do this, read Payment Reports & Export to Accounting Software.

The export will bring your accounting code stored against your site with the option for a different membership-specific accounting code. It will also allow you to search for each batch number and bulk reconcile with your bank account by matching the disbursement amount to all transactions in the relevant batch. For more details on how this works, please read Site and Organisation Settings.
 

Record Journal Transactions

With Member Jungle, you can automatically issue invoices for membership and store, courses and events purchases. You may now find that having the same information in your accounting software is double-handling. With Member Jungle, members and administrators can log in anytime and access all invoices. The members can access their invoices, and the administrators can access all the club invoices. So there may be no need to have them in both places. 

You can view the number of products sold, the type of memberships purchased, and the number of tickets sold for each event. You can also view your total revenue for specific periods, categorised by area.

This is often enough information that many clubs decide that instead of bringing across all transactions into their accounting software, they just run reports for each disbursement into their accounts and allocate the payments into the correct account accordingly. With many clubs having volunteer treasurers and bookkeepers, this is often the easiest way, providing it meets all legal and tax requirements. 

Using Your Own Gateway

Another alternative is to choose to use the Stripe Gateway as an alternative to the Member Jungle Gateway (please note: additional fees apply). 

This allows a direct feed from the gateway into your account and possibly your accounting system so you can easily reconcile all payments from your online membership system and bank account. 

Like the export option, it will typically provide a breakdown of different items purchased within one transaction. Also, please be mindful that not all accounting platforms offer this integration, so you need to research to see if this is an option for you. For example, Xero does offer this integration, and MYOB doesn’t as of the time of writing. 

Can We Still Process Physical Payments? If So, How? 

Just because you can now easily accept online digital payments doesn’t mean you can no longer process cash or direct debit payments. Not all your members are going to want to pay for things online; older members, especially, may still prefer to pay for things with cash.

As an administrator using Member Jungle, you can renew existing memberships, add new memberships, sell event tickets, and process store orders. You can also enable manual payment methods for all administrative tasks, allowing you to manually renew a member, which raises an invoice for a membership renewal that will be sent directly to the member. Your account details can also be included on the invoice for easy payment.

In addition to the automated transactions, you can manually complete payments by entering a member's debit or credit card details. This will generate an invoice and send it to the member along with other relevant information, such as event or membership details. Moreover, the transaction will be recorded against the member's account, allowing you and the administrators to view it.

Allowing manual payment methods on your website enables members to renew their accounts and choose to pay through direct transfer or cash. However, this may result in additional manual tasks as the online system cannot automatically match any manual payments in your account. As a result, you may have to manually track payments, reconcile your bank account, and sometimes even deposit cheques. Therefore, it's probably not something you want to do long-term. It would work better as a short-term measure to allow your members to get used to the new online payment system. 

 

 

How Do Transaction Fees Work?

The final question that your treasurer will ask you is, how do the transaction fees work with online payments with Member Jungle? Transaction fees, or online gateway fees, apply to all online transactions paid via direct or credit card. The amount of these fees depends on the platform or system you are using and the country. 

For Australian customers using the Member Jungle payment gateway, all transactions can be absorbed into your prices or passed onto the purchaser. You can choose different settings for different modules, such as absorbing store purchase fees while passing on events and membership fees. 

While it is becoming increasingly common for online transactions to incur fees when purchasing events and memberships, many of our customers choose to pass on all fees or increase their fees to cover the cost. This is similar to other platforms such as Ticketek, Ticketmaster, and Eventbrite, which charge an administration fee at the end of the cart purchase.

If you are using your own Stripe gateway with Member Jungle, please note that there are two components of fees: your Stripe Fees (displayed in your Stripe console) and the Member Jungle platform fees. Both the platform fees and the Stripe gateway fees can either be passed onto the member or absorbed by your club. These platform fees are charged to allow Member Jungle to maintain the integration with your own Stripe gateway.

If you want to learn more about how Stripe's fees work and how it can integrate with your Xero account, please read Setting up your Xero account with Stripe. 

What About The Other Committee Members? 

Your club’s treasurer won’t be the only committee member with questions, but there’s no need to stress. We’ve got you covered there too. Have a look at Convincing Your Committee To Get On Board With a Membership System.