Can you believe that another year is coming to a close? We have had a very exciting year here at Blue Sombrero with the launch of the Club Store and many new features. The end of December is also a great time to look back on the year and to prepare your books for the tax season.

Here are some key tips and ways in which Blue Sombrero can help.

On your site:

• Reconcile your disbursements- Hopefully you have been doing this throughout the year, but if not, now is the time. This involves classifying the amount of your disbursements by program or division. The Program Summary Detail Report and Division Summary Detail Report are helpful tools to assist you with this task.
• Clean out your Open Orders- This involves cancelling any orders that you know will not be paid. An example of this would be if a parent registered their child for a program, selected to pay by check, never sent the check, and the child did not participate.
• Refund Payments- This involves cutting a check for parents who overpaid or for parents who paid but the kid(s) did not play. Please note that refunding a payment on your site will NOT refund the payment to a credit card unless your club manages its own merchant account.

For Administrators:

• Count your inventory- If your club sells spirit wear or reuses uniforms, now is a good time to count and evaluate your inventory.
• Evaluate you fields- Do the fields need any repair or do you need to explore more fields due to overcrowding?
• Evaluate your enrollment numbers- Do you need to create more teams next year or hire more coaches?

For Bookkeepers:

• Reconcile the bank accounts. This is a task that is often overlooked but is very important to determine how much money the club has going into the next year.
• Enter and pay all the bills in your accounting software for the year. This is important information used for creating a budget.
• Enter all inventory numbers in your accounting system. These are items that you intend to sell, whether it is clothing or fund raising items.
• Check that all your loans or credit card statement match what is entered in your accounting software.
• Prepare a list of uncollectable receivables (bad debt). These are funds that you do not think the club will be collected and written off at year’s end by your accountant.
• The most important task is to back-up your accounting software to a removable storage device. There is a chance that your system could crash while you are doing your year-end transactions. It is always a good idea to store a copy of your accounting software data offsite.

Have a great holiday!