The job of the youth sports club treasurer is to create a budget and to stick to it. While the job sounds simple enough, given that a budget is the financial backbone of the club, these tasks are not exactly easy. Even when you’re not concerned with making a huge profit, budgeting and financial management involves lowering costs, paying all essential fees, and in general, managing the club or team’s cash flow. What can you do to ensure a smooth cash flow while making ends meet throughout the year?
Leverage Accounting Software
Accounting software makes it easier to track expenses, develop a budget, and adjust to unforeseen circumstances. TechRadar lists the different accounting software that you can use either for free or for small monthly fees. Apart from tracking regular fees and expenses, this type of software can also help with balancing books and creating comprehensive financial reports – allowing you to pinpoint what causes losses or profits, as well as see other patterns that are relevant to developing your budget. With the right accounting software, a treasurer can better forecast cash flow on a daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly basis.
Embrace Digital Payments and Registrations
Manually filling up and processing physical registration forms and payment documents almost always results in an administrative headache – but they’re also necessary to maintaining ideal cash flow. The good news is that these tasks can be simplified through digital tools. Those who sign up for any of our three subscription levels – Rookie, All-Star, and MVP – have access to our online software’s Custom Registrations and Online Payments subsystems. This allows you to automate club payment collections right from the sign-up process. You can also use them to streamline your club’s registration process and ensure that athletes are enrolled into the appropriate programs. Simplifying these integral processes will make it easier to direct the club’s revenue streams.
Create a Finance Subcommittee
Seeing the bigger financial picture is much easier to do when more than one person is in charge of financial decisions. On the other hand, if the whole club is involved, you’ll likely get nowhere fast. At the middle of this lies the most balanced option: establishing a finance subcommittee. Apart from someone who knows the fundamentals of accounting, a finance subcommittee for a sports club should ideally include members who are experts in health, nutrition, equipment, inventory management, and other expertise relevant to club operations. Indeed, experts from Maryville University consider financial management to be interdisciplinary, which simply means that it should be approached from many different perspectives. The type of expertise or skill set that your finance subcommittee needs depends on your club’s short and long-term goals. If you’re on a limited budget, club players who are knowledgeable about topics related to your club’s immediate needs can be assigned to the sub-committee. You can also just ask for volunteers, as players who are dedicated to the club will likely be more than willing to help keep the club running. However, if you have the budget for it, don’t hesitate to pay your nutritionist or tactical coach extra fees for their professional advice. The wider the scope of your finance subcommittee, the better you can take charge of your budget or forecast cash flow.
Establish a Culture of Accountability
The task of making ends meet shouldn’t be left to just the treasurer or even just the finance subcommittee. As Dr. Anil Lamba of the Lamcon School of Management explains, organizational and financial sustainability depends on financial intelligence across the board. After being duly instructed and reminded of their responsibilities, all members should actively take charge of being up-to-date on fees and understanding how those fees are used. When members are well aware of how their actions have a domino effect on the team’s overall budget –including how this affects their access to equipment, facilities, and even competitions– they will be more accountable and diligent about club finances. Creating this culture of accountability also lessens the burden for financial managers – allowing them to spend less time on basic tasks and more time on finding solutions to lower costs and make ends meet.
