Guide

The monthly close, in the order it actually happens

Nobody hands a new club treasurer a procedure. This is the one we would have wanted: what to do, in what order, and which of the steps are the ones that go wrong.

1. Find the flights that were flown but not logged

This is the biggest single leak in club billing, and it is almost never dishonesty. Somebody flew, the phone was in a bag, and by Tuesday it was gone. Compare bookings against logged flights for the period and chase the gaps while people still remember.

A club doing this on paper needs the calendar and the flight sheet side by side. A club doing it in software should be able to see the difference in one place, ideally with the meter readings from the previous flight as the check: this month’s starting hobbs should be last month’s ending hobbs.

2. Clear the review queue

If your club reviews flights before they bill, do it now rather than at the end. A rejected flight needs the member to fix something, and that is a two-day round trip you do not want inside the statement run.

3. Approve receipts and record expenses

Fuel bought away from base, oil, the parts invoice from the annual, hangar rent, insurance instalments. Each one lands somewhere specific: a club expense, a credit to the member who paid, or a cost against a particular aircraft. Doing this before statements means a member who fuelled the aeroplane sees the credit on the same statement as the flight.

4. Run dues

Dues follow member class, and the edge cases are the ones to watch: a member who joined mid-month, a member who left, a class that is not billed dues at all, and anyone on a payment arrangement. If your system treats "not billed dues" as a property of the class rather than a special case in someone’s head, this step takes a minute.

5. Draft the statements and actually read them

Every member’s lines, on one screen: flights with hours and rate, dues, credits, late fees, previous balance. The errors that damage a club’s trust are visible here and nowhere else. A charge on the wrong aeroplane. Two dues lines. A credit that went to the wrong member. Five minutes with the drafts is worth an evening of emails.

6. Approve, send and collect

Send the approved statements, then collect. If you are collecting by ACH, collect the whole period as one debit per member rather than one per flight: ACH fees are capped per transaction, so ten small debits cost the club roughly ten times what one costs.

Card payments cost a percentage, so decide in advance whether the club absorbs that or passes it on, put the decision in the club rules, and show the member the fee before they confirm it.

7. Reconcile the bank

Match what the bank shows against what the books show, and identify what has not cleared. Do it monthly. A club that reconciles once a year is not reconciling, it is performing an annual archaeology.

8. Look at the A/R aging, then act on it

Who owes what, and for how long. The number that matters is not the total, it is the shape: one member at ninety days is a conversation, five members at thirty days is a process problem, and a balance that grows every month is a rule the club is not enforcing.

The part that is really about the next treasurer

Every club eventually hands this over, usually to somebody who did not volunteer with much enthusiasm. What makes that handover survivable is not a tidy spreadsheet, it is a history that can be opened: entries that were never edited, corrections that show as corrections, and balances that can be traced back to the flight that caused them.

That is the argument for double-entry books in a club, and it has nothing to do with accounting purity. It is so that the person after you can find out what happened without ringing you.

Last updated 18 August 2026.