The treasurer's guide¶

You're the one the board looks at when someone asks "how much do we have?" MusterSheet always keeps student fees, payments, fundraising credits, balances, and parent statements together. If your organization chooses Integrated Accounting, MusterSheet can also keep the booster books the way an auditor wishes you would — every dollar categorized, every change attributed, nothing ever silently deleted — without asking you to be an accountant.

This page walks the treasurer console end to end. Everything here also applies to the president: both officer roles can manage the books.

New organization or new treasurer?

Start with the first-time setup checklist, staff roles & permissions, and roster and parent-access guide. This operations guide assumes the organization and fiscal year already exist.

The booster suite requires the standalone Booster tier or the full Program tier. See Trial, billing & online payments if a menu is missing, the organization is read-only, or parents cannot pay online.

Know your Accounting Workflow

Check Organization Settings → Accounting Workflow. With Official books kept elsewhere, use the student-account, fee, fundraiser, payment, balance, and year-close sections of this guide, and record official income and expenses in your outside bookkeeping system. Ledger, categories, budgets, reimbursements, receipt inbox, and treasurer reports are available only with Integrated Accounting.

A president or treasurer can change the workflow. Switching preserves old accounting records as read-only history, and does not back-post earlier student activity into the ledger.

The dashboard¶

Your own MusterSheet Dashboard greets you with a Your Booster Duties card and a shortcut to Record a student payment. With Integrated Accounting it also shows cash on hand, pending reimbursements, receipts to review, and accounting shortcuts. Click Open [your org's name] there (or choose Booster Organization from the left menu on a phone or your initials menu on a wider screen) to reach the org dashboard. Every workflow shows what families still owe and student-finance tools; Integrated Accounting also shows income, expenses, net, and accounting work waiting on you.

The ledger (Integrated Accounting)¶

The Ledger is the org's checkbook: every transaction with its category, method, who recorded it, and a running income/expense total.

Across the top, four cards keep the checkbook honest: Starting Balance (the org's bank balance on the fiscal year's first day), Income and Expenses for the year, and the live Ending Balance. Click Edit… on the Starting Balance card to set it — you only do this once, when you first bring your books over (after that, closing the year carries it forward for you).

To record a transaction, use Record a Transaction right on the Ledger page:

Pick Income or Expense, then a category.
Enter the amount in dollars (e.g. 82.50), the date, who it was paid to (or came from), and the method — cash, check, PayPal, Square, card, or other.
For an expense, attach a receipt photo if you have one; for income, there's a Receipt # field instead — the number from the paper receipt book, if you wrote one. It shows on the ledger row so you can match the books to the book.
Add a memo and submit.

Is the income money from a family? Pick the student under Student Account (optional) and the one entry does double duty: it posts the payment on the student's account and books the income row — exactly like recording it from the student's page. (Student payments take cash, check, PayPal, or Square — the ways money reaches you outside MusterSheet. Card and Other are for the org's own transactions.)

The button disables itself the moment you click, so a double-click on shaky wifi can't record the same transaction twice.

There is no delete — and that's a feature

Made a mistake? Void the entry and give a reason. The row stays visible with a Voided badge and drops out of every total. That's what keeps your books defensible: corrections leave a trail instead of rewriting history. The audit log (under Reports) records who did what, when, for every money action.

Categories & budgets (Integrated Accounting)¶

Every organization using Integrated Accounting starts with a sensible category set — Student payments, Fundraiser proceeds, Donations & sponsorships, Concessions for income; Uniforms, Travel, Food & meals, Supplies, Equipment & instruments, Competition fees, Miscellaneous for expenses. Rename, add, or archive them under Categories to match how your board thinks.

Under Budgets, give each category a number for the fiscal year. The budget page then shows Budget / Actual / Remaining per category, with the Actual column fed live from the ledger — the board report writes itself.

Student accounts¶

Students is your roster. Each student's page is their account: a signed statement of charges, payments, fundraising credits, and adjustments, with the balance on top.

Record a Payment — money that reached you outside MusterSheet: a check or cash handed over in the parking lot, or a PayPal or Square payment that landed in the org's account. Enter the amount, date, method (and check number), and the Receipt # if you wrote one in the paper receipt book. The date starts filled with today — change it when you're catching up on a payment received earlier. That date is what the statement shows (for you and the parent), and it can't be in the future. This always posts the payment on the student's account. With Integrated Accounting, it also posts the matching income row on the ledger in the same transaction. With official books kept elsewhere, the receipt number stays visible in the student's history and you record the deposit in that outside system. By default the payment counts toward the oldest charges first; if the family said the money is for something specific ("this check is for the spring trip"), open Apply to specific charges on the form and tick those charges before saving — the statement's Paid/Unpaid markers will honor your choice. (Standing at the Integrated Accounting ledger instead? The Student Account picker there records the same thing.)
Add a Charge — a one-off (lost uniform part, extra trip seat).
Adjustment / Transfer — corrections, or moving a balance between siblings. Transfers post both halves at once. An adjustment can carry a Treasurer's Note — an internal note (a receipt number, where a carried-over balance came from) that officers see on the student's history but parents never do.
Void — same rule as the ledger: void with a reason, never delete. The one exception is the date: Fix date on any entry corrects just its date in place (audited, amounts untouched), so a payment entered with the wrong day doesn't need a void-and-redo.

Fees is where season pricing lives: create a fee, choosing Paid at once (a single due date) or Paid in installments (up to six amounts and due dates), then assess it to the whole roster, a grade, or a section. Assessing shows a confirmation first — who will be charged, how much, and how many students are skipped because they already have the fee — so nothing posts until you confirm. If someone else adds or moves a student into that group while the confirmation is on your screen, confirming stops and asks you to review the new numbers rather than charging a student you didn't see. Assessing twice won't double-charge anyone.

Online payments¶

Once you've set up Stripe under Settings, parents see a Pay Online button on their student's statement. Card payments post automatically to the student's account and show up on Payments, right next to Students. With Integrated Accounting, the same confirmation also posts the matching ledger income. With official books kept elsewhere, reconcile the Stripe payout in that outside system.

Most rows settle within seconds. An age label like 3h ago only appears on a Pending row, meaning the parent opened checkout but Stripe hasn't confirmed it yet — they may still be mid-checkout, or they closed the tab without finishing. A pending payment temporarily holds the charges it covers so they can't also be paid some other way while checkout is in flight; that's expected, and it self-heals the moment Stripe expires the abandoned session.

If a payment sits Pending for longer than makes sense (hours, not minutes) and you'd like the family to be able to try again sooner, open Void… on that row. MusterSheet checks with Stripe first, before it touches anything on your side:

If the checkout link really is dead, Stripe confirms that and MusterSheet voids the payment — the charges become payable again right away.
If the parent actually finished paying in the seconds before you clicked Void, MusterSheet detects that and does not void anything. You'll see a note that the payment completed and will post to the statement shortly instead. A Void click can never make a real payment disappear.

Voiding is safe to try more than once, and — like every other correction in the app — it's audit-logged under your name, with an optional reason, so the board can see who released a payment and when.

Balances & reminders¶

Balances Report under Reports & admin shows every family's charged / credited / owed totals, biggest balances first, with the org-wide total on top.

Email Balance Reminders sends each linked parent a summary of what's due with a link to their student's statement. Two things to know:

Reminders reach claimed parent accounts only. If the page tells you "3 owing families can't be reached yet — they haven't claimed parent accounts," those families still owe — the app just has no verified email to send to. Add or correct the parent's roster email, or send a personal invitation from Invites & Parents (see Join your booster group).
Parents who owe nothing never get a reminder.

Reimbursements & receipts (Integrated Accounting)¶

Two inboxes cover money that left someone's pocket:

Reimbursements — a member paid out of pocket and wants the org to pay them back. Approve with the right expense category (or deny with a note), then Mark Paid when you hand over the check — that final step records the real expense on the ledger.
Receipt Inbox — someone spent the org's money and snapped the receipt. Verify the details against the photo and confirm it into the ledger, or dismiss it with a reason.

Fundraisers¶

Create a fundraiser under Fundraisers, set what percentage of each student's amount raised counts as credit, and fill in the per-student participation grid as money comes in. Post Credits applies the credits to student balances — and it's safe to click again later: only new or changed amounts post, never duplicates.

Reports for the board and tax preparer¶

Balances Report — charged, credited, and owed totals for student accounts. It is available with either accounting workflow.
Treasurer's Report (Integrated Accounting) — income and expense totals by category for any date range, with Starting balance and Ending balance when the report begins on the fiscal year's first day. It is a categorized financial summary to give your board or tax preparer; it is not a completed tax return. Form 990-EZ can require balance-sheet details, descriptions, and additional schedules that are outside this report.
Audit log — the who-did-what trail, filterable and exportable in either workflow.
CSV exports — student account balances and the audit log export in either workflow. Integrated Accounting also includes a ledger export. If the organization later switches to outside books, its old ledger and treasurer reports remain available under Accounting History, read-only.

Tax filing

MusterSheet organizes your records but does not provide tax advice or file a return. Use the current IRS instructions and a qualified preparer for the organization's situation.

Your officer team¶

Under Settings → Staff you'll see everyone with access to the org. Presidents and treasurers manage staff, settings, approvals, and corrections. Assistants can perform daily entry work, including transactions, students, fees, parent invitations, family codes and flyers, and leftover claims, but cannot control billing/settings or officer-only approvals. The band's director has read-only financial and roster access and can manage the season calendar; other booster work requires a staff role. Who may assess fees and record student payments is adjustable from Settings → Permissions — you can restrict it to the president and treasurer, or extend it to the band's director. See who can assess fees and record payments and the full staff roles & permissions matrix.

To bring someone on, use Add Staff: enter their Email, pick a Role (Assistant, Treasurer, or President), and click Add Staff Member. If they already have a MusterSheet account they're added on the spot. If not, they are added automatically when they create an account with that email. MusterSheet emails the invitation when delivery is configured; if delivery is unavailable, the pending role still activates on signup. Until then they sit under Pending Invites, where you can Revoke an invite that's no longer wanted.

Stepping down yourself? Your own account Settings page has a Booster Organizations section with a Leave organization button. One guardrail: the org's only president can't leave (and can't be removed) — add another president first.

Closing the year¶

When the season ends, Year Close walks you through what to do with every remaining balance — carry it forward, refund it, transfer it to a sibling, or (with the family's blessing) donate it to the general fund — and then opens the next fiscal year. The page checks for unfinished business (like graduating seniors with open balances) and won't let you close until it's resolved. With Integrated Accounting, the org's money rolls over too: this year's ending balance automatically becomes the new year's starting balance on the ledger. With official books kept elsewhere, Year Close advances student accounts to the next program year and does not alter your outside books; record any refunds there separately.

Closing is one-way

Take your time on this page — a closed year can't be reopened. Nothing is lost (the history stays readable), but new transactions can only post to the new year.