A PTA expense moves through four steps: submission, approvals, payment, recording. A common, free way to run that is a Google Form for the request and a spreadsheet for tracking, with approvals over email, at a meeting, or even directly in the spreadsheet. It works, but it’s brittle and easy to circumvent important controls.
I served as PTA treasurer for three years across two districts, plus other board roles. I’ve authored my fair share of spreadsheets to keep things running smoothly and come across a few Google Forms buckling at the seams. There are even some general-purpose tools you can buy to enhance the Google Workspace workflow. But in the end, none survive much longer than the treasurer who put them into place.
A quick note: this is general guidance, not a rule for your unit. Your bylaws or your state PTA may spell out specifics for how you collect and approve expenses.
The DIY stack
Built from free tools, the setup usually looks like this. A Google Form collects the request: name, contact, purpose, amount, and an uploaded receipt. Every submission can feed a linked spreadsheet. Approvals happen separately or as a column in the sheet. Once it is approved, the treasurer writes the check or sends a bill-pay and marks the row paid.
It is free, and you can set it up in an afternoon.
Where it fails
The flexibility of custom forms and spreadsheets that makes them so easy to start is also what makes them so hard to maintain and get right.
- The form doesn’t know your budget. Nothing checks a request against the line it lands on, so confirming it is within budget is a manual step every time.
- You can’t trust the approval record. If the yes lives in email, it is cut off from the sheet. If it lives in a column, you cannot tell at a glance whether it is legitimate without digging through the revision history, and the sheet’s owner can edit anything at any time, including someone else’s sign-off.
- Every submitter needs a Google account. A form that accepts a receipt upload makes each person sign in with a Google account, so a parent without one, or who would rather not, cannot file the request.
- Only the form’s creator hears about a submission. New responses notify the person who built the form, not the other signers who need to act, so a request can sit unseen until someone thinks to open the sheet.
- No line items or totals. A form field takes a number, not an itemized request that adds itself up, so anything with more than one line gets flattened or tracked on the side.
- It drifts over the years. The setup grows one workaround at a time. Keep one sheet and it gets large and unruly; start a fresh one each year and you lose easy search and any consistency from one version to the next.
The fix
It’s not a better spreadsheet; it’s keeping the four steps as one connected flow, so a request comes in, gets approved against the budget with the signatures your bylaws require, gets paid, and lands in the books, with nothing retyped between steps.
Where Volo Cash fits
Volo Cash is that connected flow, built for volunteer boards. A member submits an expense on a login-free form: no account, no password, just a link.
The login-free request form in Volo Cash.
From there the request routes to the right signers for approval (and pre-approval if needed), who are notified it is waiting, with the budget remaining shown right on the request. Each signature is captured on the request itself, and the payment and the record land there too.
Volo Cash approvals with live budget checks and workflow tracking.
The best part: Volo Cash can be set up even faster than a Google Form.
Expense requests are one piece of the treasurer’s job. The complete PTA treasurer handbook covers the rest, from the reimbursement process to what your bylaws require on approvals, and you can try Volo Cash free for three months.