How can PTAs simplify fundraisers, dues, and event payments?

I have a mental image of the treasurer of a PTA from several years ago. She was juggling a metal cash box, a paper spiral notebook, a phone calculator and a lukewarm cup of coffee. She was running a school carnival in the pouring rain. The tent above her was collapsing in on itself, repeatedly. Her greatest challenge, however, was attempting to keep track of the t-shirt sales, the raffle tickets and the various school restaurant concessions, all while trying to collect money from parents and students at the various booths. That was a great treasurer, stuck in a terrible system. And that’s what I see when someone says their PTA is “disorganized”.

That image has stuck with me. The treasurer worked hard to manage the cash box and the notebooks to keep track of the various sales. She worked hard in a system that could have been much improved by some simple organization. And every time I hear of a PTA that is “disorganized”, I immediately think of that woman and all of her hard work.

The real problem isn't effort, it's friction

PTAs are being devoured by the administrative tasks inherent to volunteering with the PTA. These tasks need to be managed through the correct medium to save time and PTA volunteers to focus on planning fun events for kids and creative meetings with other volunteers. Many volunteers get worn down from the time spent administering aspects of the PTA and leave the PTA. Administrative tasks need to be streamlined to save volunteers’ time.

Often it is the worst paid over-the-counter type of collection of money that drives away the best volunteers. I have seen this particularly with chasing down venmo payments and reconciling cash donations.

The worst part is, while many PTAs use a variety of tools to manage money (for example PayPal, Google Forms for sign-up sheets that inevitably get torn by 3 people), the worst part of managing money in a PTA is managing money across tools. Reconciling cash donations and online donations is a huge pain, and tracking down families who haven’t yet paid their annual dues in PTA fees is a huge hassle for any treasurer.

Annual Dues

Most problems with PTA dues payments first become apparent to the PTA treasurer when it comes time to collect annual PTA dues from all the members. Online payment options for credit card payments of dues would obviously be set up for those families who prefer to pay that way. However, there will always be families who pay by cash or send in a check by mail. And, as the year progresses, a few of those families will ‘lose track’ of their payment and it will not be paid until the treasurer starts sending out emails in March to all the members who have not yet paid for the year.

Simple is simple. It doesn’t have to be hard. Annual collection of simple financial information from parents and students to fund student activities should not be so difficult to manage. If it is, then there is a failure somewhere. But I think there is a simple way to set up a financial system to manage annual collection of dues from students and parents in a PTA. The steps to setting up such a simple financial system for collection and for processing annual dues for a PTA would be:

1. Set up a single digital payment page before the school year starts, with dues amounts clearly listed.

2. Send a direct link in your welcome email, not buried three paragraphs deep in a newsletter nobody finishes reading.

3. Set a visible deadline and follow up once, around the two-week mark.

4. Accept multiple payment methods so you're not creating unnecessary barriers for families who don't happen to use one specific app.

Online dues (as opposed to collecting cash, writing checks and sending checks in the mail) can make life so much easier for PTA treasurers than tracking down payment for past due dues. And being able to track online where each payment was for can be so very helpful at the end of the year for auditors.

Fundraisers: where things get complicated fast

It’s worth distinguishing between a simple bake sale and managing a fundraiser for a few weeks. Online ordering for different items with different pick up- or pick-up times. (This is the worst.) The payment collection is but one part of managing the fundraiser.

Most problems for a PTA dealing with online payments center around how the money was collected in the first place. They might have collected money, but they have no idea what it was for. This is especially worst when you are trying to collect year end reporting and doing a reconciliation in May. If the person who set up the online payments has left for another school and another district, it is very hard to figure out the reporting for online collected funds for school year end.

The best online payment tools for PTA collection are set up to allow the school to create very specific forms for families to pay for online school activities, and then families can pay for each form online in one transaction. Additionally, online PTA tools for payment collection allow families to specify at the time of payment what they are paying for (i.e. auction basket, spring dance tickets, school hoodies, etc). So when it comes time for the school’s auditor to do an end of year audit of the school PTA’s finances, the reports from the online PTA tools are clean, accurate, and ready for the auditor. (As an aside, I have heard from several schools that go through an end of year audit with their PTA finances, and it is a long and arduous process. Something that could be so much easier with the right online PTA tools).

A Quick Comparison

Task	Old approach	Streamlined approach
Collecting dues	Cash, checks, Venmo patchwork	Single link, multiple payment options
Event ticket sales	Paper sign-ups, cash at the door	Pre-sale online form with quantity limits
Fundraiser tracking	Manual spreadsheet reconciliation	Itemized reports generated automatically
Volunteer fees / T-shirt orders	Multiple separate forms and payments	One combined checkout with options

How to choose a payment system.

Online payment processing platforms are typically built for for-profit businesses, which have a lot of money to throw at complex backends and hire staff to manage the money coming in. The majority of online payment processing platforms have fee structures that are not very nice for non-profits, such as a fee per transaction or a monthly fee based on the amount of money processed through the year. The reporting and tracking functionality of these types of platforms is also typically geared towards a medium-to-large sized for-profit company with a large finance team. They are usually set up by one or more paid employees of the company, and there is often a lot of work involved in getting everything set up and running.

However, the first thing you need to look for is the key set of features that allow the system to serve your needs as treasurer.

• Can you collect itemized payments so reporting is automatic rather than manually assembled?

• Are the platform fees genuinely transparent, or do they have a habit of appearing in unexpected places?

• Can families pay by card without needing to create yet another account with yet another password?

• Does it handle both one-time and recurring payments, since dues renewals are going to happen again next August whether you're ready or not?

There is no one magic tool to make everything perfect for your PTA? I wish there was, but there isn’t. But, there is a huge difference between old ways and ways that are only slightly better. And whether or not that small change is worth it for you depends on a variety of things, not least of which is the amount of time you currently spend buried in the cash box or reconciling and the type of person you are.

We have to acknowledge Treasurer burnout is real. Not the specific, grinding exhaustion treasurer’s go through serving the PTA.

Treasurer burnout is a real problem. High turnover in PTA leadership is a problem that causes suffering and harm. That does not mean we can just acknowledge that problem and do nothing about it. The problem is that we are making our treasurers into accountants. They are the managers of the PTA’s funds, not the PTA’s accountants. So they spend most of their time doing paperwork. After a couple of months, one might be able to convince oneself that things are under control. But it takes a lot of time to keep on top of things, and that time could be spent on so many other things. The treasurer of the PTA should be able to focus on the PTA’s goals and spending, rather than on tedious paperwork.

But many schools are plagued by high turnover in PTA leadership. This can cause problems for the school and the PTA. Every year, the treasurers and other officers of the PTA spend a great deal of time setting up financial systems and entering in data from the previous year. Much of this is tedious work. And once they have set up the financial system for the year, the work does not end there. The treasurers must make sure that the system is current and that it is working properly throughout the year. When the treasurer leaves at the end of the year, all of this knowledge and work is lost. The next treasurer must start from scratch and spend hundreds of hours of volunteer time reentering the same information that the previous treasurer had already entered. This is an enormous amount of work and it is inexcusable that the tools that we have to aid us in this work are so poor.

Fixing PTA payment collection online is not just a short-term problem to be solved for a current treasurer’s workload. Creating a system of work for a PTA that is sustainable volunteer work is different than making the work of one person sustainable. The goal should be to create a system of work where the work can be done by anyone with appropriate transparency and access to allow others to contribute as needed.

That poor treasurer under that collapsing tent in the rain deserved better tools. You deserve better tools.