Keeping Track of All Our Cash

We're an organisation with quite a large budget, around 650.000 in yearly revenue and almost 1.000.000 DKK residing in our account currently due to Corona bonuses and leftover funds. We have an obligation to not only keep track of everything that is spent, but also to make sure we actually push for money being used in the different organisation, or at events benefitting the students at ITU.

Doing accounting and keeping track of receipts is historically a terrible process, involving lots of manual labour and an obscene amount of communication. Luckily, lots of services have emerged in the past years to handle this automatically, and since we're ITU, we'd be stupid not to take advantage of this.

We've transitioned our setup from one where treasurers of organisations had money transfered to their bank account and had to return receipts of everything they bought and wire back any excess fund. Now everyone who applies to our Student Activity Fund receives a virtual credit card via Pleo, that they can hook up to Apple Pay or Google Pay.

This means we can follow along in every purchase in real-time and receive receipts straight away after a purchase. A simple image will do and you don't have to worry about losing a receipt.

Similarly, paying and receiving invoices is a hassle. Especially since Student Council has to do the accounting in the end. From now on if an organisation is sent and invoice, they can simply forward it to a mail address, and our treasurer can pay it with one click through Corpay One. This deducts the amount from our internal budget for that organisation automatically, and similarly if they receive a sponsorship, we simply send an invoice to the sponsor and add to the organisations available funds.

Corpay scans our invoices and fill out all the information we need to pay and do bookkeeping 163 KB View full-size Download
We've also started doing our own accounting through Billy. We chose Billy, as it's simple, but also because it's the same system that Scrollbar and Analog uses. We'd like to keep things the same so it isn't too much of hassle if we want to help each other out with technical or financial decisions.

All in all, the treasurer job should be a lot more fun now, and should clear up time for the role to also encompass growing and marketing the Student Activity Fund, so that more students are aware of how easy and accessible it is to manage funds at ITU.