Question: What to do when your treasurer resigns?

I'm the president of our PTO. The treasurer and I our the only officers that have signature authority on our checking account. He just resigned. What steps should I be taking to ensure there are no questions of financial impropriety until we get a replacement treasurer? I will have our President-Elect sign our expense reports since I will be signing as acting-treasurer. All budgeted and non-budgeted expenditures will be documented in the meeting minutes and will not be complete without an expense report. What else can I do?

Asked by Anonymous

Answers:

Advice from PTO Today

Craig writes:
The first step is to go to the bank and have his name removed from the account. Make sure someone else (the president-elect, most likely) is reviewing the bank statements every month. That's a key financial control that your group should have in place at all times. Also, be sure that you have a paper trail for all expenditures. And you might want to do an internal audit now, ie compare all receipts, expense forms, deposit slips, etc. to the bank statements so far to make sure you're starting out on a clean footing. You might recruit a couple of members to help with that task -- it goes a lot faster with at least a couple of people working on it.

Good luck. We have a lot of resources on our Treasurer topic page that you might find helpful.

Community Advice

Wilson West PTO writes:
Good news! We've already had some one step up. The old treasure took it upon himself to remove his name from the account. I will get with the new treasurer to add her to the account. We're already making plans to update how checks are issued, based upon her experience in being treasurer at one of the elementary schools. It will be such a relief to work with someone who understands these protocols.