A PTA treasurer’s duties run on a yearly cycle. Every month you deposit income, pay authorized expenses, reconcile the bank statement, and report at meetings. On top of that, a handful of milestones come up through the year: adopting the budget, filing the IRS return, the year-end financial review, and handing the role off. Here is the full checklist.
I served as a PTA treasurer for three years and trained the treasurers who followed me. The thing that made the job manageable was seeing that it is the same short list of tasks every month, with a few bigger milestones layered on through the year. Once that was written down, the role stopped feeling like a pile of surprises. This is that checklist.
A note on timing: the exact months below depend on your PTA’s fiscal year and meeting schedule, both set by your bylaws. This checklist follows the most common setup, a July 1 to June 30 fiscal year on a school-year calendar. If your fiscal year is different, shift the dated tasks to match. This is the detailed companion to the year-at-a-glance overview in the complete PTA treasurer handbook.
What you do every month
These tasks repeat all year, regardless of the month. They are the core of the job:
- Deposit money the PTA took in, promptly, with two unrelated people counting and signing for any cash.
- Remit the council and state PTA’s share of any membership dues collected, on the schedule they set (often monthly).
- Pay expenses that have been authorized, with two authorized signers on each payment.
- Reconcile the bank statement as soon as it arrives, and have a non-signer review and sign it.
- Present a financial report at each board and membership meeting, covering the period since the last one.
- Compare actual income and spending to the budget and share a budget-to-actual report with the board. You cannot spend over a budget line without a membership vote, so this is a continuous check, not a year-end one.
Everything in the list below is in addition to this recurring core.
Through the year
On top of the monthly core, a handful of milestones come up in a predictable order. The exact timing depends on your fiscal year and when your PTA meets, so treat these as a sequence rather than fixed dates.
The start of the fiscal year. The new treasurer takes over. Update the bank accounts to the current officers. Collect the records, ledger, and account access from the outgoing treasurer. If a formal training or transition has not already happened, the outgoing and incoming treasurers meet to walk through the procedures and hand off the files.
The first board and membership meetings. These can fall anywhere from late summer into the fall, depending on when school starts and when your PTA holds its first meeting. At them: present the prior year’s financial review, and ask the membership to adopt the budget for the new year by motion. If the board released any funds to cover summer expenses, the membership ratifies that spending now.
Filing the IRS return. Every PTA files a Form 990 for the fiscal year that just closed. For a June 30 fiscal year, it is due November 15, the 15th day of the fifth month after the year ends. Before it is filed, the board approves the return and the officers your bylaws name (commonly the president and treasurer) sign it. File on time: missing the return three years in a row automatically revokes the PTA’s tax-exempt status.
Mid-year. Many PTAs run a mid-year financial review. Separately, file a Form 1099-NEC by January 31 for any individual or unincorporated business you paid for services above the reporting threshold during the calendar year.
Looking ahead to next year. If you are not continuing, start recruiting next year’s treasurer. The budget committee begins building next year’s budget, working from this year’s actual income and expenses and the programs the board expects to run.
Before the last association meeting of the year. Check with every program chair for outstanding expenses, especially any that would push a line over its budget. An over-budget expense needs a membership vote, and the last meeting may be your last chance to take it. At that meeting, present next year’s proposed budget for adoption, and have the membership release any funds the board will need over the summer.
The end of the fiscal year. Make sure every expense has been submitted and every reimbursement paid. Finalize all transactions and reconcile the final bank statement. Prepare the annual financial report and hand the books to your PTA’s financial reviewer or auditor. Update the bank accounts for the incoming officers and pass the records to the next treasurer.
The handoff
The end of the year is also a transition. The incoming treasurer takes over the records and the bank access, and the outgoing treasurer finishes the prior year’s return and review. Getting this handoff right is what keeps the next person from starting over from scratch.
Two guides cover this in depth: taking over as PTA treasurer: your first 30 days for the incoming treasurer, and how to hand off the PTA treasurer role for the person leaving. For the parts of the monthly work that involve paying people back, see the PTA reimbursement process, step by step.
How Volo Cash helps with the monthly work
Most of this checklist is the recurring monthly core, and that is the part Volo Cash is built to carry. It fits whatever process your PTA already runs:
- Members submit expenses from their phone with no account, already coded to a budget category, so payments come to you ready to authorize.
- The remaining balance for each budget line shows at the moment you approve, so the budget-to-actual check is happening as you go, not just at month end.
- It collects the signatures your bylaws require and generates the electronic-payment authorization, so you can pay through your bank’s bill pay.
- Every payment and deposit lands in one ledger automatically, so the monthly reconciliation is matching your bank activity to entries that are already there.
When the year-end review and the handoff come around, the records are already in order and the role carries forward to the next officer cleanly. You can try it free for three months and run your own PTA’s monthly cycle through it.
For the full picture of the role, start with the complete PTA treasurer handbook, or compare the tools in this space in the roundup of the best PTA treasurer software.