Why are parent groups moving away from cash and paper checks?

The simple scene above is taking place at 7:45 a.m. on a Tuesday morning at an elementary school. A parent is collecting money for the school’s spring carnival in a ziplock bag. The parent is writing the names of the parents who have handed over money on a legal pad. Some of the parents already have a check mark next to their names on the legal pad where the parent is writing their names. There are some parents who will say, “I’ll Venmo you later” and will write their name on a folded up piece of paper and put it in the bag. Another parent handed over a check but made out the check to the wrong organization name.

Every year, schools all over the country are collecting cash and checks in Ziplock bags at the front of the school. Volunteer treasurers scribble down the names of the parents who have paid with pens on legal pads and sometimes they even manage to check off the names of the parents who have paid. Other parents promise to Venmo later, and some even write out a check made out to the correct organization name, but it eventually bounces.

It’s All So Beautiful…

School parent groups are not using cash and checks for parent teacher association payments because they want to! They are using these old methods of paying for things because the other methods of paying for things for school fundraisers don’t work either. And, if we’re honest, the old methods of paying for things for school fundraisers never really worked very well in the first place. We just put up with it because there weren’t better options.

Reconciling the checks could also take even longer, to the point where the PTA is unable to finish their financial reporting. There are a number of real costs to volunteer hours here, and also to the errors that can occur in processing. I spoke with a PTA president who said that for several years she spent as much time trying to track down checks that had not been received as she spent planning the events for which she was trying to raise money. The checks were lost somewhere along the line. Probably.

The checks create so much trouble for the PTA treasurer and others helping to manage school finances. Because of the checks so much time is spent to collect money manually, to follow up late payments, to deal with bounces, to reconcile ledgers. All that trouble could be avoided if school fundraisers would use online payment tools. All that trouble would be avoided if school treasurers spent their time with more value, planning events, building a school community, being there for kids in school and outside of school. The treasurer of a PTA already has enough work to do without all that trouble created by the checks. The checks create so much trouble that following up and collecting late payments easily becomes the main work of the treasurer of a PTA.

How We Track The Errors

A school fundraising coordinator for a school bookstore was tracking payments for a single book fair using three separate Google Sheets, her notes app on her phone, and a paper sign-in binder. She seemed to find the whole system amusing, which gave me a clue as to why her system was so dysfunctional.

The reasons why PTA’s use check-based collection methods are many and varied, but generally fall into the following categories:

• Payments trickle in through multiple channels, so you’re always chasing a unified picture that keeps shifting
• Volunteer turnover means institutional knowledge walks out the door every year (sometimes every semester), leaving the next person to reconstruct everything from scratch
• There’s no audit trail for cash, which creates awkward ambiguity even when nothing is actually wrong
• Manually matching names to payments is genuinely error-prone, especially at high volume and under time pressure

It’s not their problem. The volunteer run groups have been saddled with the financial accounting that schools weren’t designed to manage. They’re like folding tables trying to hold filing cabinets.

So why did it take a pandemic to change things?

School parent groups have moved in mass to using collections of money on digital platforms since Spring of 2020. Why did it take a pandemic for this to happen?

Note how much more pain and suffering could have been avoided had we hit this “inconvenience” point earlier.

Now that many parent groups have discovered the work around of online payment links for fundraising events, the increased use of online payment tools for school payments is becoming the new norm. There are many new online payment tools being developed that are very easy to use for teachers, administrators and parent groups to collect, track and report school payments. These online payment tools do not require any prior experience with accounting or financial record-keeping.

General payment tools collect money. School PTA payment tools collect money and also track for the Treasurer who paid what for how much. This is a huge differentiator for the school’s Treasurer. At the end of the year (or even at the end of each month) the Treasurer will be able to very easily compile financial reports for submission to the school’s principal (or district’s fiscal department) with a PTA payment tool.

One more thing worth saying

PTAs are doing incredibly valuable work at their school and the last thing they need to do is spend a lot of time collecting and accounting for every payment of money that is being raised for events and programs at the school. Let the volunteers who are putting in time to plan the event focus on running the event and not on how to account for all of the money that was collected.

Switching to online payment collection frees up the time of PTA members to be more productive and to spend their time doing more worthy things than collecting checks. Easy online payment of money to a school or non-profit allows volunteers to avoid hours of tedious work. Who wants to collect checks when you can easily transfer money with a few clicks of a button on your computer?

The ziplock bag had a good run. It really did. But so did the fax machine.