The Leader

Accounting Made Easy

_­A new year brings with it a new line of lodge officers, a new slate of goals. But don’t let the sense of optimism and opportunity blind your lodge to the other thing the new year brings: tax season. If spreadsheets make your heart skip a beat or if a pile of receipts gives you a migraine, don’t worry, there’s help available. From filing taxes to keeping track of your annual expenses and revenues, the Grand Lodge financial service team can make the new year less stressful.

“The biggest challenge I see lodges face is that they don’t update their financial records on a monthly basis,” says Maribel Pasamic, controller for the Grand Lodge of California. “They wait until the end of the year and scramble to get it done in time.” The result is a whole lot of unnecessary stress. But it doesn’t need to be this way. California lodges have access to a suite of tools to make this sort of accounting easy. At the center of this toolbox is Intacct, an integrated accounting system. With Intacct, lodges can keep track of their expenses easily. And since it’s integrated with iMember 2.0, it also makes recording your dues revenue more straightforward, providing you with an invoice for each payment.

Beyond the ease of use, Intacct makes it simpler to ask for help. Being cloud-based, the Grand Lodge financial services team can access a lodge’s records remotely through Intacct. That also means lodges experience a seamless transition when there’s a change of treasurer or secretary—no longer do new officers have to make sense of a pile of their predecessor’s spreadsheets and Quickbooks files.

That's precisely what appeals about the program to Eugene Jeanne, junior warden of Petaluma-Hamilton No. 180 and a member of the Hall Association board there. When he first got involved with managing the hall's finances, he found that they were being handled partly by hand and partly through Quickbooks, though only one member was familiar enough with the program to take charge. "So when he was out, we were in a quandary," Jeanne says. 

Being already familiar with Intacct, he recommended the hall association adopt the system. "Now, we have one person doing the inputs, and each month, I can run the reports and present them," he says. And if he's indisposed, it's easy enough for another member to step in his place. Now, he's turning his attention to getting the Vitruvius No. 145 Temple Association in Petaluma onto the same system.

And the best part is that as of 2021, this service is entirely free for lodges to use. (A small service fee is still charged for hall associations.)

Intacct is a simple-to-use service, but for those needing an introduction to it or a refresher, you can contact the Financial Services team to schedule a one-on-one tutorial.

In addition to Intacct, Grand Lodge offers other free services, including filing your lodge’s annual 990/199 return. Although lodges do not need to be using Intacct to access this service, hall associations must be in order to take advantage of it. Other free financial services offered by Grand Lodge include assistance working with the IRS to reconcile tax problems and management of a lodge’s live membership and general investments. Says Jeanne, "I recommend Intacct to any lodge. It’s a piece of cake."

If your lodge would like to take advantage of the suite of financial assistance offered by Grand Lodge, call the Grand Lodge Financial Services Team at (415) 292-9170.