Manage Your Finances
You will absolutely need to track every VOCA grant dollar and all matching funds once you are awarded a grant. These records will be used by VOCA Administrators to justify and balance your budget and expenses.
There are many ways to track your expenses.
Quickbooks:
This is the most popular accounting software for easily tracking and streamlining your expenses. If you already have and use this, that’s great. If you are using Quickbooks but not tracking expenses against different funding sources, there are many ways to set this up. One common way is to use Customers and Jobs. Create a Customer called “VOCA” and a job with the year of the grant, such as 2016. Every time you enter an expense that VOCA pays for, add the VOCA:2016 job to the expense line (there’s a field for this in Quickbooks).
If you don’t have Quickbooks, that’s ok! There are many ways you can track your expenses.
For example, create a simple Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet:
Create a spreadsheet that shows your VOCA budget, including every line item and amount. Then create another column where you’ll enter actual expenses.
Create a second spreadsheet with all of the matching funds you plan to track. The spreadsheet should include the item you are tracking, the date, the calculation for tracking (ex. cents per mile for travel), and actual value.
Tip: You can use the budget worksheet you’ve already created in your application and add columns that will track actual expenses against your budget.