P&C bookkeepers. Save time, reduce risk, maximise impact.
Support your treasurer and office holders, keep the P&C compliant, and put the committee's energy where it belongs - the school community, not the spreadsheet.
Services built for how P&Cs run.
- End-to-end bookkeeping
- Payroll processing
- Accounts payable processing
- Benchmarking
- Monthly financial reporting
- Face-to-face assistance
- BAS preparation
- Best-practice guidance
- Specialised support
- Statutory audit assistance
"A great service! Affordable, professional, friendly and always available to help and answer the many questions I've had. Can't recommend LINK enough."
Why your P&C needs a bookkeeper.
Support your treasurer
A volunteer role becomes sustainable when a professional carries the processing - treasurers guide, we do.
Remain compliant
Records, payroll, BAS and reporting obligations met properly, whatever the committee's turnover.
Separation of duties
Independent bookkeeping is a control in itself - protecting funds, volunteers and reputations.
Make audits cheaper
Clean, reconciled books cut statutory audit time - and audit invoices - significantly.
Save volunteer hours
The committee's scarce energy goes to events and the school, not data entry.
Scale with ease
New canteen, OSHC service or major fundraiser? The bookkeeping flexes without drama.
What a well-run P&C file gets right.
P&C files run well in a small number of predictable ways, and getting there is never about anyone having done anything wrong. A volunteer inherits a system and hands it on again, so the good habits need building into the handover itself. The other one worth getting right is keeping P&C money and school money clearly apart. Two separate bodies, two separate accounts, every payment clearly one or the other.
A handover built into the year
Most P&C files we take over were built by a treasurer who has already left. The logins, the spreadsheet, the reason a particular account exists - all of it walked out at the AGM. The incoming treasurer spends a term working out what the last one meant, and half the year is gone before anyone can answer a plain question about the tuckshop.
Tuckshop takings reconciled to sales
What lands in the account is not what the tuckshop sold. Online ordering platforms pay a net figure after their cut, EFTPOS settles a day behind, and the cash banking includes the float. Coded straight to income it misstates takings, hides the platform fee and makes a short till impossible to spot. It belongs in a clearing account that reconciles back to the daily takings.
The fete recorded line by line
A fundraiser that puts $4,180 in the bank tells the next committee nothing. Ticket presales, sponsorship, stallholder fees, the rides contract, food costs and the float all vanish into a single line. Recorded gross on both sides, you can see which parts of the day earned their volunteer hours and which ones cost you a Saturday.
Grants recognised as they are spent
Grant money usually comes with conditions, a spending window and an acquittal at the end of it. Dropped into general income, the P&C looks like it had a strong year and the unspent portion becomes indistinguishable from ordinary funds. By the time the acquittal is due, someone is reading twelve months of bank statements trying to prove what the money bought.
Anyone paid, paid through payroll
The moment the P&C pays a convenor, a coach or a few casual hours in the uniform shop, it is an employer. PAYG withholding, super from the first dollar for adult staff, STP filed each pay run, the correct award classification and workers compensation cover all attach. Honorariums are where this gets missed most often, because they do not feel like wages.
Every sub-committee with a visible balance
Swimming club, music support, the year six committee. Each one believes it has its own money, and often each one has its own bank account that nobody reconciles. Tracking inside a single file gives every sub-committee a balance it can see, without splitting the P&C into accounts the treasurer then has to chase.
What the first term looks like.
No long onboarding project, and nothing that needs a committee vote to begin. We work out where the P&C actually stands, then build a file that the next treasurer can pick up without a handover meeting.
- 01
Find out where you stand
A free look at the file, the bank accounts and the last set of audited statements. We check the things nobody has looked at in years: whether the P&C is registered for GST, whether the income tax exemption is self-assessed or held through charity registration, who is still a signatory, and what the auditor asked for last time.
- 02
Build a file that survives handover
Cloud accounting with the chart of accounts written in P&C language - tuckshop, uniform shop, fundraising, grants, each sub-committee - plus receipt capture and card controls so approving a payment and making it are done by different people. Access belongs to the association, not to somebody's laptop.
- 03
Get the trading activities reconciling
Tuckshop and uniform shop takings matched to the ordering platform and card settlements, floats treated as float rather than income, stock counted so the uniform shop shows a real margin, and payroll set up properly for anyone the P&C pays.
- 04
Report to the committee, then to the AGM
A monthly report short enough to be read at a meeting, with the sub-committee balances on it. At year end the file goes to the auditor already reconciled and documented, and the treasurer presents statements to members without needing an accounting background to explain them.
What this looks like in practice.
A primary school P&C running a uniform shop, a tuckshop and three fundraising events a year.
Case study · P&C associationsA volunteer treasurer, a uniform shop, and a handover with no records.Cash handling that survives an audit, and books the next treasurer can actually pick up. See what changed
The background
Run entirely by volunteers, with a treasurer who took the role because nobody else would and inherited a shoebox, a spreadsheet and a bank login. The association was doing real good and nobody doubted anyone's honesty.
The challenge
Honesty was never the issue; evidence was. Uniform shop and tuckshop takings were banked in lumps with no reconciliation back to what was sold, so a variance could not be explained even when it was innocent. Fundraising money arrived as cash, envelopes and transfers with no consistent record of who paid for what. Volunteers were paid small amounts for occasional work without anyone checking whether that made them employees. And the books lived in the treasurer's personal spreadsheet, so each annual handover started from nothing - which is how an association ends up unable to answer a straightforward question from the school, the department or its own members.
The approach
The goal is not sophistication. It is a set of books a volunteer can maintain in a couple of hours a month and hand over intact, and records that let an ordinary variance be explained rather than argued about.
How the work ran
Term 1
Get it out of the shoebox
Xero set up for the association with a chart of accounts matched to how a P&C actually reports - uniform shop, tuckshop, fundraising, grants, levies - and bank feeds connected so the treasurer stops typing transactions in by hand.
Term 2
Reconcile the counter, not just the bank
A simple takings sheet per trading day, reconciled to the banking and to stock movement in the uniform shop. Two people count, one records - the standard control, and the one that protects volunteers rather than suspecting them. Fundraising income recorded per event, with a float and a documented banking routine.
Term 3
Make the handover survivable
Month-end reduced to a checklist a non-accountant can follow, a reporting pack the committee can read at a meeting, and payment arrangements for volunteers reviewed - anything that looked like employment referred on rather than assumed. The next treasurer inherits a system, not a shoebox.
What changed
- Records
- a personal spreadsheetan association-owned ledger
- Takings
- banked in lumpsreconciled per trading day
- Cash handling
- one person countingtwo counting, one recording
- Fundraising income
- unallocatedrecorded per event
- Annual handover
- starts from nothinga documented checklist
P&Cs almost never have a fraud problem. They have an evidence problem, and it lands on whichever volunteer is holding the role when somebody finally asks a reasonable question. Good records are what protect the people doing the work.
A worked example, built from the pattern these engagements follow in p&c associations. The business is composite and unnamed; the mechanics, the sequence and the order of work are the ones we use. Talk to us about your own numbers.
Frequently asked questions.
Why does a P&C need a professional bookkeeper?
Because treasurers are volunteers with day jobs, and the obligations aren't volunteer-sized: compliant records, payroll for canteen or OSHC staff, BAS where registered, and an annual audit. A professional bookkeeper supports the treasurer instead of replacing them - and survives committee changeovers.
Does this make our audit cheaper?
Consistently, yes. Auditors charge for time, and clean, reconciled, well-documented books cut audit time dramatically. Several P&Cs have found the bookkeeping partly pays for itself here.
What happens when our treasurer changes over?
Nothing bad - which is the point. The books, processes and history stay with us, so a new treasurer inherits a working system instead of a mystery shoebox.
Can you handle our canteen and OSHC payroll?
Yes - employees paid correctly under the right award, with super on payday and STP filed each run.
How do the debit cards and tools work?
We set P&Cs up with modern tools: secure debit card management, receipt capture and cloud bookkeeping, so separation of duties is real and nothing depends on one person's shoebox.
Does our P&C have to be registered for GST?
It depends on turnover, and not-for-profit bodies register at a higher threshold than ordinary businesses do. The part that catches committees out is what counts towards it: tuckshop takings, uniform shop sales, fundraising income and most other trading activity add up together, not one activity at a time. Some P&Cs are registered and did not need to be. A few are trading well past the threshold and have never checked. We work out which one you are, and where the P&C is registered we prepare and lodge the BAS.
We are income tax exempt. Do we still have to lodge anything with the ATO?
Almost certainly, yes, and this is the obligation committees are least likely to have heard about. A not-for-profit that self-assesses as income tax exempt rather than holding charity registration is now expected to lodge an annual self-review return with the ATO confirming it still qualifies. If your P&C is instead registered with the ACNC, the annual information statement covers the ground instead. Either way it is a yearly job with a due date, and it is on the treasurer unless someone else is doing it.
We received a grant. How should it be recorded?
Against the grant, from the first dollar. The funding goes to its own income line and every payment made from it carries a matching code, so at any point the committee can see how much is left and what it has gone on. When the acquittal is due the report already exists rather than having to be reconstructed from bank statements. Where a grant arrives before the work happens or runs across a financial year, the unspent portion is carried rather than counted as this year's surplus, so the P&C does not appear to be sitting on money it has already committed.
Can each sub-committee see its own balance?
Yes, and without opening another bank account for it. Tracking categories in the accounting file give the swimming club, the music support group or the tuckshop their own income, costs and running balance while the money stays in one account the treasurer can actually reconcile. Each sub-committee gets its number at the meeting, and the P&C keeps one bank reconciliation instead of five.
Give your treasurer a professional team.
Talk to a P&C bookkeeping specialist - call 07 3899 8311 or book a free consultation for your committee.