Team Edition (Booster Clubs & ASB)

Why Team Edition?

If you’re a booster club or an ASB (student activity) organization, you’re not really keeping one set of books - you’re keeping one set of books that has to answer for Boys Soccer, Girls Track, Marching Band, and every other team under your umbrella. Team Edition adds that layer to BeeKeeper: every transaction can be tagged to a team, each team carries its own balance forward year to year, and every coach or chair can see their own team’s numbers without ever logging into BeeKeeper.

This is separate from Team Management, which covers the people who log into BeeKeeper (your treasurer, board members, and so on). Team Edition is about the teams, clubs, or projects your organization raises and spends money for.

Turning It On

Team Edition is available to organizations whose Organization Type (see Organization Settings) is Booster Club or ASB. An admin turns it on from Settings > Update Settings, and picks the word your group already uses for its teams - Team, Club, Project, or Group. BeeKeeper uses that word everywhere from then on - in the sidebar, on forms, in emails.

Turning on Team Edition retires the older Activities feature for your organization, if you were using it - the two can’t run at the same time.

Setting Up Your Teams

1. Go to Teams (labeled with whichever word you chose) in the sidebar
2. Click New Team (the button reads New Club, New Project, or New Group instead, depending on the word you picked)
3. Give it a name and, optionally, a description
4. If the team already has money that belongs to it - common when you turn on Team Edition mid-year - enter a starting balance and the date it’s as of. BeeKeeper moves that amount out of the organization’s general carryover and into the new team’s own balance with a journal entry; nothing moves in or out of the bank, since the money was always there, it just didn’t have a name on it yet

Add contacts - the coach, booster president, or committee chair - from the team’s own page, by name and email. Each contact gets one link that covers every team they’re on, so a parent helping with both the Boys and Girls teams doesn’t get two separate emails. If a link gets lost or goes to spam, resend it from the team page - it sends the same link again rather than a new one, so a copy they may still have keeps working. Archiving a team is a separate step from the rest of the team form, so it’s never one accidental click away.

Tagging Money to a Team

Once Team Edition is on, every place BeeKeeper writes a transaction line lets you tag it to a team: manual entries, the bank feed, the Needs Review queue, split transactions, checks, transaction rules, and expense reports. Because tagging happens at the line level, a single check that’s really half for one team and half for another works exactly like that.

Each Team Keeps Its Own Carryover

A team doesn’t have its own bank account - the money sits in your organization’s shared bank account(s) - so BeeKeeper tracks what a team has left as a balance, the same way an ASB trust account works. Every team gets its own equity account for this behind the scenes; see Chart of Accounts.

When you close a fiscal year, each team’s surplus (or deficit) for the year moves into that team’s own balance, not into one pooled number for the whole organization. Money that was never tagged to a team still closes into your organization’s regular carryover equity, same as it always has.

Because a team has no cash account of its own, a team budget’s beginning balance is that team’s fund balance rather than the organization’s bank balance - so the budget reads as “what this team has to spend,” not “what the whole club has in the bank.” See Budget Management for creating a team’s budget.

Reports By Team

• The Profit & Loss report can be filtered to a single team
• The Team Report breaks income and expenses out by team, with an Unassigned section for anything not tagged - so the total always ties back to your organization-wide P&L
• Each team gets its own statement in the familiar format: beginning balance, income, expenses, and ending balance. Until the fiscal year is actually closed, the ending figure is labeled “Projected,” since it won’t match the chart of accounts exactly until the closing entry runs
• The General Ledger shows which team (if any) is on each line

See Financial Reports for how to run these.

Publishing to the Team’s Page

Teams don’t get a live view of your books - you publish to them on your own schedule, once a month (or whatever period) is reconciled and you’re ready to share it.

1. Open a team, or go to Teams, and click Publish
2. Choose which teams, which time frame, and which documents to include (statement, budget, expense reports)
3. Publish

Every contact on an included team gets one email listing what’s new - so a parent helping with three teams gets one message, not three. Their page shows that frozen snapshot: a team reading their March update in June still sees exactly what March said, and a correction you post later doesn’t silently rewrite it. Older updates stay on the page and stay readable.

Publishing the same team and period again replaces what’s there rather than stacking a second copy, and you can take a publication back entirely from the publications list if you need to - every contact who received it loses access to that update, and the link in their email stops working.

As the treasurer, you can always click View Team page (or View Club page, View Project page, View Group page, depending on the word you picked) on a team to see exactly what its contacts see (or, if you’re not a contact yourself, a read-only preview of the same page).

The Teams list itself shows each team’s current balance and what it’s spent against its budget, so you can see where every team stands without opening each one.

Expense Reports Charged to a Team

An expense report can be charged to a team. If that team has contacts, one of them sees it first, with two buttons: Yes, this is ours or Not ours. Saying yes sends it on to your treasurer’s normal queue; saying no ends the report the same way a treasurer’s rejection would, with their reason carried to the submitter. Either way, it’s never the payment decision - the treasurer still approves, rejects, and decides how it’s paid. If a team has nobody assigned to answer, this step is skipped automatically and the report goes straight to the treasurer. If a report is stuck waiting on a contact who hasn’t responded, an admin can push it through so one unresponsive coach never freezes a volunteer’s reimbursement.

Submitting through ReimburseBee, BeeKeeper’s mobile expense app, works the same way - picking the team is part of the submission.

See Expense Reports and Reviewing & Approving Expense Reports for the rest of the expense report workflow.

Limitations

• Team Edition is available only to organizations whose type is Booster Club or ASB
• A team’s fund balance isn’t its own bank account - team money still lives in the organization’s shared bank account(s)
• Team contacts sign in to nothing - their link is the only access they have, scoped to their own team(s)

Common Questions

Can PTAs or PTOs use Team Edition? Not currently. It’s available to organizations whose type is Booster Club or ASB.

What happened to Activities? Team Edition replaces it. An organization eligible for Team Edition can’t also use Activities, and turning on Team Edition retires Activities for that organization.

Do coaches or chairs need a BeeKeeper account? No. They get an emailed link to their team’s page and never sign in.

What if a parent helps with more than one team? Add them as a contact on each team using the same email address. They get one link that lets them switch between every team they’re on.

If we rename a team, does its balance account rename too? Yes, automatically - as long as you haven’t already given that account a custom name of your own. If you have, BeeKeeper leaves your name alone.

What happens to a team’s page if we take a publication back? That team’s contacts lose access to that specific update - the link in their email stops resolving. Anything published before or after it is untouched.

Can a team have its own budget? Yes - a budget can belong to a single team instead of the whole organization. See Budget Management.

Does closing the fiscal year work differently with Team Edition on? Yes - each team’s surplus or deficit for the year moves into that team’s own balance instead of one pooled number for the organization. See Close the Books.