A PTA treasurer’s report is a written summary, prepared for each bank account, of the money that moved during a period: the balance at the start, the income received, the disbursements paid out, and the balance at the end. You present it at every association and executive board meeting, and the secretary records it in the minutes.
I served as a PTA treasurer for three years across two school districts and trained the treasurers who came after me. The treasurer’s report is required, and it gives everyone both insight into how money flows and oversight of the records.
A quick note: what follows reflects the financial procedures most PTAs, PTOs, and booster clubs follow. Report names, meeting schedules, and thresholds vary from one organization to the next, so check your own bylaws and adapt.
What goes in a treasurer’s report
The report answers three questions for each account: where the money started, what moved, and where it ended. Standard PTA financial procedures ask for:
- Balance on hand at the start of the period. The book balance the day the period opened.
- Income received, itemized by date and source, with amounts credited to the general fund and to any special funds shown separately.
- Income that does not belong to your association, listed separately from the rest.
- Disbursements paid out, itemized, with the check or transaction reference.
- Disbursements that do not belong to your association, again listed separately.
- Balance on hand at the end of the period.
If your PTA has a checking account and a savings account, both get their own report, each with its own opening balance, activity, and closing balance.
Every account is covered
Under standard PTA financial procedures, any account the association owns that money is deposited into or paid out of is treated as a bank account and needs its own monthly treasurer’s report.
That includes your payment processors. PayPal, Stripe, Square, and anything similar holding a balance for your PTA belong in the reporting set alongside the checking and savings accounts. With every account reported, money that comes into the PTA is tracked and cannot leave again without showing up on a report.
Funds that don’t belong to your association
Some of the money passing through your accounts was never yours to spend. The clearest example is membership dues: your unit keeps its portion and forwards the rest on to the council, district, state, and national organizations. Book fair income due to a vendor, a scholarship collection, and anything you are holding to pass along work the same way.
These amounts are reported separately, in their own income and disbursement subsections. If you fold them into your totals, your PTA looks like it raised and spent more than it did, and the numbers you present to the board stop describing the money you have to work with.
A single deposit can be partly yours and partly not. A membership deposit of $1,350 might be $750 your unit keeps and $600 you are forwarding. Both halves show up, in their own sections.
Why there are two reporting periods
Most treasurers end up preparing two sets of reports.
Reports are prepared for both the association and the executive board, and those two bodies meet on different schedules. So one set runs from association meeting to association meeting, and the other runs from board meeting to board meeting. They cover overlapping money over different date ranges, and both are produced.
Picking the end date
Close the report as near to the meeting date as you can, so the numbers are current when someone asks about them.
The limit on that is reconciliation. A period you have not reconciled can still change: transactions land late, a deposit clears for a different amount, something posts twice. Reporting on unreconciled figures can lead to issuing corrections at the next meeting. Using an end date matching your last reconciliation reduces the chance of a correction.
Statement close dates vary. Some banks close on the last day of the month, others on the last business day. Check the online portal for anything that posted after your statement closed, or set the end date to the earliest close date across the statements you have.
Other required reports
A budget versus actuals comparison, at least quarterly. Where the treasurer’s report says what moved, the budget comparison says how that tracks against the plan the membership adopted. It also checks that spending does not exceed what the membership approved for any one category. If you are still setting up your budget, our PTA budget guide and free template covers how to structure the lines so this comparison is useful.
An annual financial report at the end of the fiscal year. This reports gross receipts and disbursements for the whole year, with the same separation between amounts belonging to the association and amounts that do not. Unlike the monthly report, the annual financial report is presented to the association and adopted by motion, and it often feeds the numbers you need for your IRS filing.
What a finished report looks like
Here is one account for one month, with every section above in place. The membership deposit is the split one from earlier: $750 the unit keeps, $600 passing through.
Riverside Elementary PTA · General Checking · October 1 to October 28
| Item | Amount |
|---|---|
| Balance on hand, October 1 | $8,412.60 |
| Income | |
| Oct 3 · Fall book fair, publisher settlement | $2,184.15 |
| Oct 9 · Membership dues, unit share | $750.00 |
| Oct 17 · Spirit wear sales | $486.00 |
| Oct 24 · Corporate matching donation | $500.00 |
| Total income | $3,920.15 |
| Income not belonging to the association | |
| Oct 9 · Membership dues, council through national share | $600.00 |
| Total income not belonging to the association | $600.00 |
| Disbursements | |
| Oct 6 · Check 1042 · Teacher classroom grants, fall round | $1,800.00 |
| Oct 14 · Check 1043 · Reimbursement, book fair supplies | $137.42 |
| Oct 21 · Check 1044 · Fall festival, inflatable rental deposit | $425.00 |
| Oct 27 · EFT · Annual insurance premium | $289.00 |
| Total disbursements | $2,651.42 |
| Disbursements not belonging to the association | |
| Oct 20 · Check 1045 · Membership dues forwarded | $600.00 |
| Total disbursements not belonging to the association | $600.00 |
| Balance on hand, October 28 | $9,681.33 |
Your savings account and any others get their own versions, each with its own opening balance, activity, and closing balance.
Doing it in Volo Cash
Whatever your process looks like now, this is the part Volo Cash takes off your plate. Because every expense, deposit, and journal entry is already recorded as it happens, you do not assemble the report. You open it.
The Treasurer’s Report tab on the Reports page gives you every active account in one document: the balance on hand at the start, the income and disbursements that moved it, the pass-through subsections kept separate, and the closing balance. Accounts with no activity still appear, at zero, so nothing looks quietly omitted.
A few things that make the monthly rhythm easier:
- Set the period once. Choose Last month, the fiscal year to date, or any From and To dates you like. The arrows step a whole period at a time, so a report covering one month moves a month and a quarterly report moves a quarter.
- It remembers. The report opens on the last period you downloaded a PDF for, which is usually the period after the one you just filed.
- Pick your reference number. Show the check or transaction number you recorded, or the sequential disbursement number Volo Cash assigns, whichever your board is used to seeing.
- Every row is a link. Click any transaction to open the request or ledger entry behind it, with the budget categories it was charged to listed underneath. When someone at the meeting asks what a payment was for, you can answer from the report.
- Reconcile first, report second. The bank feed brings the account’s own transactions in to match and clear against the ledger, so the period is settled before you close a report on it.
Download it as a PDF, hand copies to your president and secretary, and attach it to the minutes.
The same records also produce a budget versus actuals report for the quarterly comparison, and reconciliations that a non-check-signer can review and sign. A year of consistent reports is also most of what a reviewer asks for at the year-end financial review.
You can try all of it free for three months. Start a free trial.
Not sure where the treasurer’s report fits in the rest of the year? Our complete PTA treasurer handbook walks through the whole job, and the year-round duties checklist lays out what falls due when.