The notebook · August 3, 2026 · 10 min read
By The Reunion Fund team
Who should hold the money for a group event?
Someone always ends up holding everyone's money. Why that job is worse than it looks, and the four rules that protect the person doing it.
Nobody is ever appointed treasurer. That is the first thing to understand about the job.
There is no vote. There is a moment, usually in a group chat and usually late, when the venue needs a deposit by Friday and someone types I can put it on my card and we'll settle up. That is the whole appointment ceremony. From that sentence forward, one person is the bank.
It looks like a favor. Within a month it is a job, and by the end it is three jobs stacked on top of each other, only one of which anybody ever names out loud.
The three jobs you accidentally accepted
The first is cash flow. You are now the group's credit line. The pavilion wanted $450 in March and the money comes in through June. The caterer wants half up front and the last eight people pay the week of. At any given moment there is somewhere between four hundred and four thousand dollars of other people's obligations sitting in your personal account, and none of it is yours, and all of it is your problem if it doesn't arrive.
The second is bookkeeping. Forty-one payments in five formats. Two people paid in cash at a barbecue. One sent a check made out to your spouse. Three sent Venmo with no note, and one of those three has the same first name as your cousin's boyfriend, so you are not entirely sure which of them paid. You are maintaining a ledger you did not ask to maintain, in a spreadsheet only you can see, in hours nobody counted.
The third job is the one nobody names, and it is the heaviest: you are holding the group's trust. Not metaphorically. Structurally. You are the only person who can see the numbers, which means you are the only person who could be wrong about them, which means every question about the money is now a question about you.
The trap in the third job
Here is what makes the trust burden genuinely unfair, rather than merely tiring.
The group cannot verify without seeming to accuse. Say a cousin wants to know where the $6,400 went. It's a reasonable thing to want to know. But there is no neutral way to ask it, because the only person who can answer is the person who has spent four months doing this for free. So the question either doesn't get asked, or it gets asked badly, and either outcome is bad.
And you cannot prove anything without being asked. You could send the spreadsheet unprompted, but volunteering an audit reads as defensive. Why is she showing us this? So you sit on a perfectly clean set of books, quietly hoping the subject stays closed.
Both sides are stuck. The group is trusting rather than knowing, and you are trusted rather than verified. Those feel similar from the inside and they are not remotely the same thing. Trust is a feeling that can be withdrawn on a rumor. Verification is a fact that survives one.
Charles Schwab's 2024 Modern Wealth Survey found that 71% of Americans feel awkward discussing money with friends. That statistic is usually cited to explain why people avoid talking about salaries. It also explains, precisely, why a reunion committee will let a $6,400 question sit unasked for eight months and then ask it badly at the worst possible moment.
The four answers people try, and why three of them fail
"We'll use whoever's most responsible"
This is the default, and it's not wrong about the person. It's wrong about the problem.
Picking a trustworthy treasurer solves for dishonesty. Dishonesty is not what actually goes wrong. What goes wrong is a card getting closed, an account getting frozen after an unusual pattern of deposits, a family emergency in month four, a hard drive dying with the only ledger on it, a payment that failed silently so the sender thinks they paid and the receiver never saw it, or the world's most honest person genuinely losing track of who gave her cash at the barbecue.
None of those are integrity failures. All of them are single-point-of-failure failures. A better person does not fix a structure with one point of failure. It just means the failure, when it comes, is nobody's fault, which is somehow worse, because now there's no one to be angry at and the money is still short.
"It's fine, we have a spreadsheet"
A spreadsheet is a record. It is not a control. (The other four points where a spreadsheet gives out.)
It tells you what one person says happened. It cannot tell you whether it happened, it does not stop anything from happening, and in practice it lives in one person's account with one person's password. The moment the group's confidence wobbles, a spreadsheet is exactly as convincing as the person who typed it. Which is to say, it convinces the people who already believed and nobody else.
Records answer what happened. Controls answer what can happen. Every group event needs both and most have only the first.
"We opened a joint account"
This one actually works, and it is underused. A committee bank account with two required signers is the traditional solution and it is traditional because it is correct.
The reason people skip it is friction. Most banks want an EIN and some organizing paperwork, it takes two to four weeks, and it is genuinely a lot of process for a family picnic. Above roughly $10,000, do it anyway. Below that, the cost-benefit is real and most groups reasonably decline, which is how you end up back at one person's checking account.
"Everyone just Venmos Dana"
The most popular answer and the weakest one, for a reason that has nothing to do with Venmo's reliability.
Payment apps move money. That is all they claim to do and they do it well. What they do not do is tell you who still owes, what a payment was for, whether the group agreed to the spend it funded, or whether the balance you're looking at is the real balance. There is no concept of a group in a peer-to-peer transfer, only a series of unrelated payments that happen to point at the same person.
And the money is legally entangled with that person's money the entire time it sits there. If the account is frozen for a completely unrelated reason, the reunion's money is frozen too. If a family reunion treasurer's bank flags a pattern of forty inbound transfers in three weeks, that is not an exotic scenario. That is the normal operation of a fraud system encountering a family reunion.
There is also a tax question that most volunteer treasurers never think about until it arrives. Money you collect on behalf of a group is generally not your income. But "generally" is a word doing a lot of work, and payment platforms report activity based on what it looks like, not what it is. If the total is meaningful, ask a tax professional before it becomes a question in April rather than after.
The answer institutions figured out a century ago
Churches, PTAs, booster clubs, small nonprofits and every volunteer organization with a functioning treasurer converged on the same set of rules a long time ago. They are not complicated and they are not about suspicion.
1. The person who requests money is never the person who approves it. Separation of duties. The single most important control there is, and the one groups skip most often, because in a small committee the person who wants to pay the caterer is usually also the person with the login.
2. It takes at least two people to move money. Two signatures on the check. Two approvals on the release. Not because either one is suspect, but because two independent people making the same mistake at the same moment is much rarer than one person making it alone.
3. The ledger is visible to everyone with a stake, without asking. Not available on request. Visible. The difference is enormous. "You can see it if you ask" places the cost of verification on the person asking, and 71% of people would rather eat the doubt than pay that cost.
4. Nothing about the rules is personal. The rules apply to the most trusted person in the room specifically because they are the most trusted. That is not an insult. It is the point.
That last rule is where groups get stuck emotionally, so let me be blunt about it.
Controls do not exist to catch the dishonest person. They exist to protect the honest one.
When two people have to approve a payout, the treasurer is no longer the sole author of the group's financial history. When the ledger is open, nobody has to ask her a question that sounds like an accusation. When she reimburses herself for the $450 deposit and someone else signs off on it, that reimbursement is now a documented group decision instead of a withdrawal she made from an account containing other people's money.
She was always going to do the right thing. Now she also gets to be visibly, unarguably, permanently on record as having done it. That is a gift, not a suspicion, and it is the reason experienced volunteer treasurers are usually the ones asking for the second signature.
So: who should hold the money?
If the total is over about $10,000 or the group is recurring: open a committee bank account with two required signers. Do the paperwork. It is the strongest answer available and it is worth the three weeks.
If it's a one-off in the low thousands: a single person's account is a defensible practical choice, but only with the four rules bolted on. Write them down before you collect a dollar. A tool that enforces them is better than an agreement that relies on everyone remembering.
Never, in any scenario: one person collecting into a personal account, spending at their own discretion, and reporting on it afterward from a private spreadsheet. That is the arrangement nearly every group actually uses, and it is the arrangement that produces every reunion money story you have ever heard.
Whichever route you take, ask any tool you're considering one question. Not "can it collect money," because almost everything can collect money.
Ask: after it collects, who can move it, and who has to agree?
Most tools have no answer. They collect into one person's balance and hand that person the keys, which means the structure is identical to Venmo with a nicer receipt. Where the group's money is concerned, the collection is the trivial half. What can happen to it afterward is the entire question.
What this looks like when it's built in
This is the problem Reunion Fund was built around, so I'll describe the mechanism plainly rather than pitch it.
Contributions are paid directly into the organizer's own Stripe account. Reunion Fund never takes custody of the money. It is not a bank and not a middleman sitting on your funds. The organizer's name is still on the account, the same way it would be with a committee bank account.
What changes is the second half. Releasing pooled funds requires approval from at least two committee members, and from at least half the committee. The person who requested the money cannot cast the approval that clears it, and neither can the organizer who receives it. If the system cannot confirm who the organizer is, the release does not go through. It fails closed rather than guessing.
And the committee's ledger is visible to the committee. Budget, contributions, and payouts all sit on the same page as the tasks and the guest list, so "how much have we collected and what's left" is a link somebody opens instead of a text somebody has to send.
That is the whole idea. Not a better bank. A structure where money only moves when the group agrees it should.
The line worth remembering
Somebody in your group is going to end up holding everyone's money. That part is nearly unavoidable. A deposit will come due before the collections do, and one person will step up, and it will probably be the most organized and most generous person you know. (The same thing happens at a work offsite, with one extra problem: you cannot chase a colleague the way you can chase a cousin.)
What is avoidable is making that person carry the trust burden alone on top of it.
The person doing all the work should not also be the person nobody is allowed to ask about.
Give them a second signature. Give the group an open ledger. It takes ten minutes to set up and it is the difference between a group that has a treasurer and a group that has, quietly and permanently, a suspect.
Planning something with a group? Reunion Fund gives a committee one shared workspace (tasks, RSVPs, budget, documents and chat) with an optional shared fund that pays contributions straight to the organizer through Stripe and takes two committee approvals to release. Free to start: two active events, up to 30 guests each. reunionfund.com