The Problem With Membership Money

Membership dues are the one kind of income that isn’t entirely yours.

A PTA charges $12 for a membership, but $4.50 of every one of those dollars belongs to the council, district, state, and national PTA. It sits in your checking account for a few months, and then you write a check and send it up. It was never your income — you were holding it.

Treasurers who record the whole $12 as income end up overstating what their unit actually raised, and then have nothing on the books explaining the big check they write to the state PTA in November. BeeKeeper’s membership tracking splits that automatically, every time, so your income statement is honest and your remittance obligation is visible as a real number.

If your group doesn’t have pass-through dues — most PTOs, booster clubs, and ASB groups don’t — you can still use membership tracking to route dues to a dedicated income account and keep a running count of memberships sold.

Setting It Up

An admin does this once, in Settings > Update Settings > Memberships.

Leave Membership Income Account on “No membership tracking” and the feature stays off — the Received Funds form won’t show a Purpose option at all.

Creating the Withholding Account

The withholding account has to be a liability account, because that’s exactly what it is: money you owe someone else. If you don’t have one yet, add it from Bookkeeping > Chart of Accounts — a liability account named something like “Due to State PTA” or “Membership Dues Payable” works well. See Chart of Accounts.

Working Out Your Withholding Amount

Add up every per-capita amount your unit owes upward for one membership. Your state PTA publishes these, and your council usually adds its own. For example:

Enter $4.50 as Withholding per Membership. If you charge $12, your unit keeps $7.50 per member.

Recording a Membership Payment

1. Open your checking account and go to the Received Funds tab
2. Click Receive Funds
3. Fill in Payment Type, Date, Amount, check number, and who it came from — same as any other item
4. Under Purpose, choose Membership
5. Enter the Number of Memberships this payment covers
6. Save

There’s no income account to choose — membership items always use the Membership Income Account from your settings.

Number of Memberships matters. It’s not just a count for your records; it’s the multiplier BeeKeeper uses to work out how much of the payment is withheld. A family paying for three memberships with one $36 check should be recorded as one item with a count of 3.

What the Split Looks Like

With $12 memberships and $4.50 withheld, a $36 check for three memberships breaks down as:

BeeKeeper calculates the withheld portion as your rate times the membership count, and everything left over becomes your income. If your organization isn’t a PTA, or you haven’t set a withholding amount and account, the whole payment goes to your membership income account with no split.

In the pending list, membership items show as Memberships (3) in the Category column instead of an account name.

Depositing Membership Payments

Nothing special here — membership items sit in the pending list alongside everything else and go into a deposit the same way. See Received Funds & Deposits.

When the deposit posts, BeeKeeper adds up all the withheld amounts across every membership item in the batch, and all the income amounts, and credits each to its account on the same journal entry. Your Cash Verification Form’s Breakdown by Account section shows both lines, so the two people signing it can see exactly where the money is going.

A deposit of twenty $12 memberships posts as: checking up $240.00, Due to State PTA up $90.00, Membership Dues up $150.00.

Remitting What You Owe

Your withholding liability account balance is your running answer to “how much do we owe upward right now?” Check it any time on your Balance Sheet or from the Chart of Accounts.

When your remittance is due:

1. Write the check to your council or state PTA — see Writing & Printing Checks
2. Categorize it to your withholding liability account, not to an expense account
3. Send it

That last point is the one people get wrong. The remittance is not an expense — it’s you handing over money you were already holding for someone else. Booking it to the liability account brings the balance back down toward zero, which is exactly what should happen. Booking it to an expense account would double-count: you’d have already excluded the money from income, and now you’d be deducting it again.

After remitting, your liability balance should equal the dues from any memberships collected since — memberships you haven’t sent up yet.

Best Practices

• Set the withholding amount before your fall membership drive. It applies to items as you record them, not retroactively
• Update it when your state or council changes their rates, usually at the start of a fiscal year
• Reconcile your liability balance against your membership count. Memberships sold since your last remittance times your rate should equal the balance. If it doesn’t, a payment was probably recorded as General instead of Membership
• Remit on schedule. Holding another organization’s money longer than your bylaws allow is the kind of thing that shows up in an audit

Common Questions

Why don’t I see a Purpose option on the Received Funds form? Membership tracking isn’t turned on. An admin needs to set a Membership Income Account in Settings > Update Settings > Memberships.

Why don’t I see the withholding fields in settings? They only appear for organizations whose type is PTA. PTOs, booster clubs, and ASB groups don’t have pass-through per-capita dues, so the fields are hidden — membership dues go entirely to your income account.

We’re a PTO but we do owe dues to a parent organization. What do we do? Record the dues as General income, then book the payment upward as an expense to a dedicated expense account. It’s not as clean as the withholding split, but it’s accurate and it keeps the obligation visible.

Someone paid a discounted membership. Will that work? Yes, as long as the amount is more than the withheld total. A $12 membership with $4.50 withheld can be recorded at $10 — you’d keep $5.50. But recording it at $4.00 will fail, because there’d be nothing left for your unit after withholding. If someone genuinely paid less than the per-capita amount, record it as General income and handle the shortfall separately.

One check covers a membership and a donation. How do I record it? Split it into two received funds with the same check number: one Membership item for the dues, and one General item for the donation pointed at your donations income account.

Can I change the withholding rate later? Yes, and it applies to everything you record afterward. Items you already recorded keep the split they were saved with — which is correct, since they were collected under the old rate.

How do I see how many memberships we’ve sold? The Number of Memberships is stored on each item and shows in the Category column of your pending list and on each deposit’s detail page. For a running total, divide your membership income account balance by what your unit keeps per membership, or check your withholding liability activity.

What if I already recorded dues as General income this year? Edit the item if it’s still pending and switch its Purpose to Membership. If it’s already deposited, it’s locked — record a correcting journal entry moving the withheld portion from your income account to your liability account.