Guides / The treasurer's guide

The new allotment treasurer's guide

So you put your hand up at the AGM, or nobody else did, and now you are the treasurer. You have inherited a spreadsheet of uncertain accuracy, a cash box, and a bank account with two signatories, one of whom moved to Spain. This guide is the job in plain English.

What the job actually is

Strip away the formality and an allotment treasurer does five things:

1. Collects the rent from every plot holder, once a year or on their anniversary dates.
2. Pays the bills: water, insurance, the head lease rent if your association leases from the council, skip hire, seeds for the trading hut.
3. Keeps the records: who has paid, who has not, and where every pound came from and went.
4. Reports to the committee and AGM: a simple income and expenditure summary, usually once a year, plus a balance.
5. Hands it all over cleanly when their term ends, in a state the next person can actually use.

Notice what is not on the list: you are not personally liable for members who do not pay, you do not need accounting qualifications, and you do not need to produce audited accounts. Most associations need an independent examination at most, and many small ones simply have a second committee member check the books.

The annual cycle

The records that matter

You need exactly three things, and a spreadsheet handles all of them to start with:

• A rent record: one row per plot, the amount due, and the payment against it. Ours is free to download: allotment rent record template.
• A cash book: every pound in and out of the bank account, dated and described. Your bank statement plus a running note of what each line was for.
• The paper trail: receipts, invoices and the rent notices you sent. A folder, physical or digital, is fine.

The traps that catch new treasurers

The single-signatory bank account

If money can leave the account on one signature, fix it this month. Two signatories (or dual authorisation on online banking) protects the association and, just as importantly, protects you from ever being suspected of anything. Most banks offer free "treasurer" or community accounts that support this.

The personal-account shortcut

Rent paid into a volunteer's personal account, a PayPal registered to someone's home email, records on one person's laptop. It always starts as a convenience and it always ends badly, usually the year that person leaves. Everything financial should belong to the association.

Cash without a witness

Never count or bank cash alone if you can avoid it. Not because anyone distrusts you, but so nobody ever can.

The undocumented discount

Half rent for the chairman's neighbour, agreed verbally in 2019. Every discount and concession should be a committee decision, minuted, and visible in the rent record. It protects you from arguments you did not start.

Making the handover painless

The best thing you can do for your successor, and your association, is keep the whole system in a state where you could hand it over tomorrow: records in a shared place, the bank mandate up to date, and a one-page note explaining the rent cycle. If your predecessor did not do this for you, you know exactly why it matters.