Auditing your club's records
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Auditing your club's records It's almost tax season again. Just about time to close out
another year and move on to next year.
But wait! Before you throw all those 1099's, bank & brokerage
statements, and a copy of the club's tax return into a folder and forget about
them, you club should perform an internal audit. A committee of
members of your club, other than the financial partner, should review and verify
the accuracy of the club accounts for the past year. Some clubs do this as
part of a regularly scheduled meeting, getting everyone involved in the
process. This participation helps all members to become more aware of the
functions performed by the financial partner, more familiar with the accounting
software and methodologies employed, and more familiar with the tax return that
the club is required to file. Remember, even though your club may
have a designated financial partner or treasurer, every member of a partnership
is equally responsible to ensure that the club's financial house is in
order.
In preparation for the audit and review by the audit committee, the
financial partner should collect all records applicable to the period being
audited. Those records would including the following ....
Having received all of the collected paperwork the audit committee
is ready to begin. You'll be reconciling and verifying these records
against the club books. Since your bivio books are online, you have
two choices. You can either verify these documents while online or you can
print your reports from bivio and use those as the source of your
verification. I prefer the later. That way, once completed,
you'll have some written documentation of the audit that can be included
in your paper archives. In either case, which bivio reports
do you need to use?
Auditing this pile of paper may appear to be a daunting task, but
it won't be if the club records are in order. Simply go through,
transaction by transaction and verify each against that which is entered in
bivio. If the club records are in error, it's much better to
annotate the discrepancy and have the financial partner fix those
errors now rather than waiting. Ignoring errors,
inconsistencies, and omissions will do nothing but create much larger problems
later. So, let's get started.....we'll be done before you know
it. Let's......
Completing an audit of the clubs records is very important.
Each member should feel confident in the accuracy of the club's books and that
all tax filings have been done properly.
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