This form is required to be filled out annually. It needs to be reviewed (and signed) by each of your Treasurers and is due to your Service Unit Treasurer by June 30th AT THE LATEST.
GSUSA, and by extension our own GSOSW council, have non-profit status with the IRS. Having correct and timely financials turned in from each troop is important. The guidelines we receive from council are really straightforward and there are several resources available to give you the best path to success.
Official Resources from Council
Troop Funds Spreadsheet (Form 107b) - This is an Excel .xlsx file that is pre-formatted to help you keep track of your finances throughout the year and makes it considerably easier to fill out your final form in June.
Instructions for the Troop Financial Form - This is a PDF with step-by-step instructions to explain how the fields on the final TFR (Form 108) need to be filled out.
Troop Financial Report (Form 108) - This (along with your May bank statement) is the form that needs to be submitted to your Service Unit Treasurer by the deadline.
Tips & Tricks for a Stress Less Report
Designate a primary money person. You're required to have at least 2 people from 2 separate households/relationships on your bank account. But you really need only 1 place where all receipts end up. It is usually easier to have just one person who physically receives all receipts and uses them to reconcile the bank statements. This person is also usually the one who fills out the TFR in June and sends it to the other signers for review. All co-Treasurers are still equally responsible for making sure all the troop's finances are in order, but it's easier to have a primary point of contact from a logistical point of view.
Make note of debit card suffixes for all card holders. All Treasurers on an account need to have a separate debit card. No sharing allowed! And all Treasurers should know the last 4 digits of each other's cards so that when you're reconciling bank statements, you know who incurred each charge.
Keep an envelope or zipper pouch for money and/or receipts in your go-to meeting bag. Make sure it also has room for a piece of paper. Tuck receipts in that envelope as you go and use the paper to record any notes you may need about money changing hands if you don't have an actual receipt book you're using. (Example: I pick up a vest for a new Scout while I'm at the store and the parent pays the troop back with cash. If I don't write down why I have that cash right when I get it, I may not remember what it was for. Especially if multiple families are paying for things at the same time.) This envelope needs to be the ONLY place you put incoming receipts/money/notes so that you don't have to wonder where they are later.
Download your bank statements every month. Especially if you are a US Bank/SinglePoint user. Those things expire after 2 months and you have to run a separate report on their webpage to get them back. More information about SinglePoint (like how to retrieve those older statements) can be found here.
READ your bank statements every month. At least do a quick check to make sure the charges you're seeing make sense. It is a lot easier to figure out what suspicious charges are while it's all still fresh in everyone's mind. Also a good time to poke your other card holders for their receipts if they didn't get turned in to whoever is taking primary on funds tracking.
Update your troop funds spreadsheet each month. If you time this for when you download your bank statement each month, you can get everything entered and reconcile the statement against your spreadsheet and make sure nothing's missing. This is the point where I take any receipts that are now recorded in my spreadsheet and move them from the envelope I keep in my leader bag to a separate envelope I keep with my GS stuff at home. Get a new piece of paper in your envelope so your old notes don't confuse you after you've already balanced them out. If every month isn't do-able, I highly recommend at least doing it quarterly:
- September: get all of the summer activities recorded and have clean books heading into the new GS year.
- December: get all of the beginning of the GS year stuff recorded along with any Fall Product transactions and be ready for the upcoming cookie season.
- Late March: cookies. At this point it's all about the cookies. And recording all of the Square transactions from cookies. Plus any charges from holding traditional events in this time period like World Thinking Day and the Girl Scout birthday/week.
- June: The TFR is due this month. You should have just been waiting for that May bank statement to hit so that you can close out your financial year and get this report over to the SU Treasurer.
Use Emilee's Financial Helper Spreadsheet - This is basically a fancier Form 107b. I had written a spreadsheet to help fill out the TFR before GSOSW came out with their newest color-coded one, and I adapted their color-coding onto mine, but kept my more robust formulas. There's an instructions tab that you should read all the way through to see where my version of the spreadsheet has extra perks that you may prefer.
Additional Info
Turning your Troop Financial Report in on time is one of the requirements for the Golden Trefoil award. I highly recommend checking that out if you haven't seen it already. It can be earned annually and it helps make sure you hit several of the traditions and encouraged activities throughout the year.