Four questions about how your records are kept today, then a short course that has the masjid running in about twenty minutes. Adding the members is an optional step, not a prerequisite.
10 lessons about 17 minutes to get running Free, no account needed
Four questions about how the mahallu keeps its records today. The course is built from the answers, and nothing you answer leaves your browser.
Part 1
5 lessons About 17 minutes in total
Five short lessons. Not one of them needs a member on file, and at the end of them the masjid is running on it.
Part 2
5 lessons Optional
All optional, in any order, weeks later if you like. Adding the members is the one committees mistake for a prerequisite.
Open Settings and check the name, the place and the contact number. These print on every receipt and sit at the top of every report, so they are worth two minutes now rather than a correction after a hundred receipts have gone out.
More on this: Settings and committee
On an Android phone, open Settings, go to This device and choose Install app. On an iPhone or an iPad, open the page in Safari, tap Share, then Add to Home Screen. It then opens from the home screen like any other app.
Installing is per device, so each committee member does it on their own phone. There is nothing to download from a store and nothing to update by hand.
More on this: Settings and committee Frequently asked questions
Every account starts with a General fund, and for a masjid that keeps one common account that is the whole answer. Move on. Add a second fund the day a second pot actually starts, and nothing recorded before it is disturbed.
Money that arrives through a place or an occasion, the Friday bucket or the box at the entrance, is neither of those. That is a collection source, and what it brings in lands in the funds you have already made.
More on this: Funds and campaigns Is this a fund?
Take money you would be recording anyway, the Friday bucket or a payment from a family standing in front of you, and run it the whole way: record it, issue the receipt, then look at the fund total. One real entry teaches a committee more than an hour of explanation.
Do this before anyone else is shown the software, so the first thing they see is a working example rather than an empty screen.
More on this: Collections Recording payments
Optional, and the reason most committees stall. You do not need it to record money. Add it when you want the other half: who has paid, who is behind, and a ward sheet to walk with.
Do not copy the old register cover to cover. Enter the house, the head of the family and one working phone number. Everything else can be filled in over the next year as people come to you, and most of it will be.
Split the list by ward and have each ward entered by someone who knows its houses. Adding houses and members needs a Treasurer login, so for the entry week give each of them one of their own, and change them back to their usual role when the register is in. Three people entering their own ward finish in an evening what one person would spend a week on, and each of them knows their houses well enough to catch a wrong name.
More on this: Houses and families Members
Put the monthly varisangya against each family as you enter them. That one figure is what turns a list of names into a register: a month a family has not paid then shows by itself, and nobody keeps a separate arrears book.
Where families pay different amounts, enter the real figure for each rather than an average. An average looks tidy and makes every arrears list wrong.
More on this: Members Funds and campaigns
Enter the arrears as they stand today, then stop. Do not back-enter five years to make the totals agree with the old book. The old book stays the record of the old years; this one starts clean from the month you begin, and the committee can say exactly that at the general body.
More on this: Follow-up rounds
Give the secretary, the treasurer and each collector a login of their own rather than passing one around. Who recorded an entry is frozen at the moment it is made, so the record survives a rename, a resignation and a change of committee. A shared login loses the one thing that matters most when a figure is questioned a year later.
More on this: Roles and access Staff and salary
Last, and entirely optional: the mahallu’s own page, with prayer times, notices and a lookup where a family can check their own payments without telephoning the treasurer. Leave it off until the register is in a state the committee is happy for people to see.
More on this: Your public page Member payment lookup
Most committees do not start from nothing. There is a register of houses, a receipt book, a cash box and, increasingly, a spreadsheet somebody maintains on their phone. The question is not what the software can do; it is what to do on the first evening, and in what order.
Answer the four questions below and this builds the course for your situation. It is in two parts. The first is about twenty minutes and does not need a single member on file, which is the part almost everybody gets wrong: you do not have to type the whole mahallu in before you can record a rupee. The second part is everything else, whenever you have an evening for it.
This is the question committees ask before any other. Is the Friday bucket a fund? Is the donation box a fund? Is the Ramadan drive a fund? Two short questions settle almost every case.
Every rupee has both answers. The confusion comes from trying to make one thing answer both, which is how a masjid ends up with a “Friday Collection fund”, a “Box fund” and no idea what it holds for the building.
| What the committee calls it | What it is here | Why |
|---|---|---|
| The Friday collection | A collection source | It is the occasion the money arrived on. Make the source once, then record what each Friday brought in, and choose the fund it goes to |
| The donation box at the entrance | A collection source | Recorded on the day the box is opened and counted, with no member named |
| A house-visit round | A collection source | The round is an occasion. If it has a target and an end, run it as a campaign instead |
| Monthly or yearly varisangya | A subscription fund, with each family’s subscription on their own record | It is ongoing and per family, which is the only thing that makes an outstanding list possible |
| Building money families pay towards every month | A subscription fund of its own | It keeps going, and the committee reports its balance separately |
| A roof repair with a target of ₹10 lakh | A campaign | It has a target and an end, and can be opened to the public with its own page |
| A Ramadan or Eid drive | A campaign | Same: one-off giving towards a cause, not a subscription anyone holds |
| The madrasa account | A subscription fund of its own, if families pay towards it regularly | Keeping it separate here is what keeps it separate in the statement |
| Rent from a shop or a room | Recorded against the waqf property, landing in a fund | The property is the record and the rent is a payment against its tenancy |
| Zakat | Not the committee’s money to hold | In the Shafi‘i school followed across Kerala it is given by the person who owes it to those entitled, so it does not pass through the mahallu’s books and there is no fund to make for it |
Everything else a mahallu keeps has one place it goes, and getting that right at the start saves rearranging later.
| What you keep today | Where it goes | What that gives you |
|---|---|---|
| The register of houses, by ward | Houses | A ward-wise list a collector can work down, and arrears totalled per ward |
| The names inside each house | Members, each linked to a house | One record per person, with the phone number on it |
| The varisangya written on the family card | The subscription on the member | An outstanding list that maintains itself, with no separate arrears book |
| The receipt book | Payments, and the receipt each one issues | A numbered receipt the family keeps, which can be checked later against the register |
| Bills, vouchers and the imam’s honorarium | Expenses | An income and expenditure statement the general body can be shown |
| The cash box and the bank pass book | The cash book | The balance the treasurer reads out, without adding up the book by hand |
| Amounts promised at a meeting but not yet paid | Promises, which appear in the follow-up rounds | A call list, instead of a promise living in somebody’s memory |
| Land, shops and rooms let out | Waqf properties, with rent recorded against the tenancy | Rent due and rent received, next to the rest of the accounts |
| Death, marriage and meeting announcements | Notices | A page for each one that can be forwarded to the family group as a link |
Almost every setup that stalls, stalls for one of these reasons. None of them is obvious until somebody has lost a fortnight to it.
No, and believing so is the commonest reason a committee never starts. Funds, collections, receipts, expenses and the cash book all work with no members on file at all. Add the households when you want the other half of the register: who has paid, who is behind, and a ward sheet to walk with. That can be a month later.
No. It is a collection source, which is the place or occasion money arrives through. The Friday bucket, the donation box at the entrance and a house-visit round are all sources. What they bring in goes into a fund, and the fund is what the money is for: General, Building, Madrasa. One is how it arrived, the other is what it is meant for, and every rupee has both.
Yes, and it does not come from a store. On Android, open Settings, go to This device and choose Install app. On an iPhone or an iPad, open the page in Safari, tap Share, then Add to Home Screen. It installs per device, so each committee member does it on their own phone, and it updates itself.
About twenty minutes to have the masjid actually running: the details, the app on a phone, the funds, one real receipt and last month’s expenses. The household list is the only long part, and it is optional. A few hundred houses already in a spreadsheet is an afternoon of tidying and minutes of importing; the same mahallu on paper is about a week if the ward collectors each enter their own ward.
No, and it is usually a mistake to try. Enter what is outstanding today and start recording from this month. The old book remains the record of the old years, which is exactly what it is for, and the committee can say so plainly at the general body. Back-entering years of history costs weeks and introduces errors nobody can later check.
Yes. Names, house names, notes and fund names can all be typed in Malayalam, and the screens and printed receipts are available in Malayalam as well as English. Each person picks the language they prefer, so a secretary reading English and a collector reading Malayalam work on the same register.
Leave it blank and add numbers as families come to the office or to a collector. A family without a number still appears in the register and in the outstanding list; what it cannot do until a number is added is receive a message or look its own payments up.
Nothing has to be copied or handed over physically. The register belongs to the mahallu, not to the treasurer, so a handover is creating logins for the incoming committee and removing the outgoing one. Entries keep the name of whoever recorded them, so the previous year stays readable and attributable after everyone in it has stepped down.
