A PTA treasurer recently pulled out a ziplock bag from behind her desk. It was filled with checks, cash, and a sticky note that said “$20 – paid by Sarah’s mom…?” This was the treasurer’s system for managing payments to the school. But it was a system built for her and her family’s 2024 way of life and was therefore not ideal for the rest of the school.
The way school finances are handled today does not have to be as it is. Today’s school financial management systems are not able to keep up with the way that families live today.
The paper chase nobody signed up for
The Volunteering Parents provide administration and support to the school and its Parents, in order to help achieve the schools objectives. But the Treasurer often has little or no support with his or her administration functions such as collecting money, reconciling accounts and tracking of money collected for events and activities. The Treasurer’s time is valuable and is given to school volunteering in the first place. In the example above the school activities coordinator had trouble finding out who paid for the spring carnival wristbands, no doubt because the Treasurer had no way of tracking the money paid for them. It would be much better to give the Treasurer a system that allows him or her to administer the collection of money for the events and activities with ease, rather than a leaky bucket that fills up the pool, but actually takes up so much of the Treasurer’s time that he or she is unable to volunteer as much time as he or she would like.
This time of year the largest time-suck for the school activities coordinator for the past year or so would be sending out “friendly reminders” for field trip activity payments for the school’s club that participates in the field trips. This would take up more time for her than actually planning the field trips for the kids. This is an avoidable administrative drag on the time of school volunteers.
The reality is that people forget to pay things from time to time. Most people do not carry cash with them. And let’s face it a lot of people intend to write a check and then forget the checkbook in another bag, or in another car. So the real question here is how can we make it easier for people to do the things that they intend to do. And if we make it easier for people to do the things that they intend to do then more people are going to do them.
So what actually moves the needle?
Reduce the friction of payment for your school or non-profit. It is only a matter of seconds, i.e. 30 seconds to pay with a smartphone as opposed to a check in the mail.
I spoke to a school activities coordinator last fall and she said she spent most of her time as treasurer sending out “friendly reminders” to parents about to pay for field trips that they had signed up for their kids to attend.
- Online forms with built-in payment so families can commit and pay in one step, not two separate ones
- Automatic reminders that go out without anyone having to manually follow up
- Transparent tracking so the treasurer isn’t piecing together a puzzle from three different notebooks
- Options for families to pay in installments when the amount is larger (think: class trip deposits)
The old approach
A better approach
Cash and checks stuffed in envelopes
Online payments collected instantly
Manual tracking across three different spreadsheets
Automatic payment records and reporting
Chasing families with increasingly apologetic reminder emails
Automated follow-ups built into the platform
Volunteer makes special trips for bank deposits
Funds deposited directly to the group account
No paper trail when the treasurer moves on
Full history accessible to new leadership
(online payment platform for pta) for groups collecting for items such as school dues, event fees, fundraiser contributions, etc. All online payment platforms designed for use by pta groups such as
The old approach
A better approach
Cash and checks stuffed in envelopes
Online payments collected instantly
Manual tracking across three different spreadsheets
Automatic payment records and reporting
Chasing families with increasingly apologetic reminder emails
Automated follow-ups built into the platform
Volunteer makes special trips for bank deposits
Funds deposited directly to the group account
No paper trail when the treasurer moves on
Full history accessible to new leadership
are designed for financial transactions typical of those collected by a school group.
(When I first found platforms for pta payments, I was skeptical at first. But watching a treasurer struggle through 40 minutes of a spreadsheet that he shouldn’t have had to deal with in the first place changed my perspective.
The “just use Venmo” problem
One final misperception is that personal accounts like Venmo are a suitable way for pta groups to handle collections for school activities. They have worked for some period of time for some pta groups. For pta groups that have used online personal funds to manage school activities, well-intentioned volunteers were doing their best with the tools available to them. For school activities collections, however, there are some important limitations to using personal funds to manage payments for activities. The inability to perform audits, for example, and the inability to control who manages the cash when the treasurer of the PTA leaves are only two of the serious limitations to the use of a collection of online personal funds for managing school activities and the payment of dues for a group. It is far better to use a system of online school payments designed for pta groups that has been proven to work for schools and for PTAs.
School groups need a way to collect money that keeps their treasurer’s personal funds are kept separate from, that has good reports, and doesn’t disappear when the treasurer leaves the district (which happens more often than planned for).
Schools Then and Now
| The old approach | A better approach |
| Cash and checks stuffed in envelopes | Online payments collected instantly |
| Manual tracking across three different spreadsheets | Automatic payment records and reporting |
| Chasing families with increasingly apologetic reminder emails | Automated follow-ups built into the platform |
| Volunteer makes special trips for bank deposits | Funds deposited directly to the group account |
| No paper trail when the treasurer moves on | Full history accessible to new leadership |
What families actually want
While every family is motivated to support their children’s school in its activities, the primary motivation to pay for field trips, and other activities is to be able to. It is that simple. Make payment for such activities as easy as filling out a form on their phones to pay for them.
Making paying for school activities as easy to pay for a lunch at a fast food joint on the way to work at noon for a person would mean they will participate in paying for the school activities.
The part that doesn’t get said enough
I made an error in my previous post when referring to my son’s elementary school. In addition to planning the field trips, his treasurer, the school activities coordinator, would spend hours each month sending “friendly reminders” to parents who had not paid for their children’s field trips. This process would consume most of her time and prevented her from doing all of the other work of planning and running the school activities. As I said before, this process is preventable and is a huge drain on the time of the people who run these groups of volunteers.
Time spent on payment processing for school events can be better spent for school activities’ volunteers. The hours can be used to create a wonderful school event or program, writing a grant instead to fund it, or simply to be a volunteer of a school group and recover from all the hours spent on being a school administrator instead.
Time for the bag of crumpled up checks to retire, permanently.
