Financial Management Plan (Treasurer, Bookkeeping, and Bank)

Hugh has announced that he’s not planning to continue as treasurer past his current term. He’s also noted the costs of QuickBooks (they’re now only offering an annual subscription payment plan (even for the desktop version). These two facts lead to required actions on our part.

• Treasurer. Make sure we’re recruiting a new treasurer. Rob Lofthouse has expressed an interest.

• Bookkeeping Software. Given the costs for QB — roughly $1000/year — and the limited number of transactions we need to track due to check writing, we MAY want to consider another bookkeeping software or system.

• Bank. If Hugh’s leaving, we need to consider changing banks. As we’ll no longer be tied to Hugh’s home address.Maybe we need to consider an online-only bank as a replacement that might work no matter where our treasurer lives.

MWSA Leadership Challenges/Changes

Update for May Board Meeting

• Treasurer volunteer (to run at the end of our current terms in office): Rob

• Membership Secretary

  • John’s been “acting” secretary for many months, and I need to stop acting. ;-)

  • Workload:

    • Most work is automated by our membership system (Wild Apricot), but there are typically 3-5 emails to answer each month.

    • Also, each member whose dues expire transitions automatically to associate status. Although the membership status/level is updated automatically, we must manually update their associate member expiration year—the only routine transaction not automatically handled by our system. These updates take about 30 seconds per member and involve about 5-15 individuals monthly.

• Chairperson of Volunteers

  • Why do we need this?

    • Because only a handful of people routinely do the lion’s share of work for MWSA (this is a typical problem for any volunteer organization).

    • We’re burning out the “usual suspects” mentioned above.

    • Frankly, “care and feeding” of volunteers is one of the most important jobs that MWSA should have.

  • No board member has volunteered yet; I’d rather recruit from our board than try to get a volunteer by begging our general membership (which almost never works).

  • Possible Duties (to get us started)

    • Manage existing efforts and suggest systems for:

      • Volunteer jobs. This usually means coordinating with existing chairs (awards, IT, Dispatches, Ambassadors, etc.).

      • Recruitment of new volunteers.

      • Recognition and retention of existing volunteers.

Initial Entry (March 2025)

It’s never too late to start looking for the “next generation” of leadership.

• Hugh has let us know he’s not running for another term as our treasurer.

• I will probably not want to continue as president after my current term.

• As much as I had to beg Val to stay on as VP after taking over as president upon Jim’s resignation, I wouldn’t be surprised if she were ready for a break in the action as well.

I’m mentioning the above so we can all imagine what we’d like to happen going forward.

Chairperson of Volunteers? Any volunteers?