How to keep masjid accounts: funds, records and a monthly report

Most masjid accounts are kept by someone who never asked to be an accountant. A respected man in the community is handed a notebook and a cash box, and for years it works — until the day someone asks where the construction money went, and the answer is in a book only one person can read.

What follows is not accountancy. It is the smallest system that survives that question.

#Start with the funds, not the ledger

Before you record a single rupee, decide what your funds are. Everything else follows from this.

Money given to a masjid comes in two kinds.

General money is given for the masjid, whatever it needs. Electricity, repairs, the imam's salary, cleaning — all of it comes from here.

Money given for a stated purpose is different. A Zakat collection, a Qurbani fund, a construction appeal, Fitrana at the end of Ramadan — each of these was given for something. It is not the masjid's money to use freely; it is money the masjid is holding for a purpose the donor was told about.

In charity accounting the second kind is called a restricted fund, and the rule attached to it is simple: it can only be spent on the thing it was collected for. That is not a technicality. It is the entire basis on which someone handed over the money.

So the first job is to list your funds honestly:

• General — everything not given for a stated purpose
• Zakat — and see the next section before you touch it
• Sadaqah, if your masjid collects it separately
• Fitrana / Zakat al-Fitr — collected and distributed in days, so it needs its own line
• Qurbani, in its season
• Any appeal — a new wudu area, a generator, a roof

Each needs a balance you can state on its own. "We have 22 lakh in the account" is not an answer if four lakh of it is Qurbani money.

#Zakat is where committees get into trouble

Here is the question that causes the most arguments, and the one I am least qualified to settle: can Zakat money pay the masjid's bills?

There is real scholarly disagreement here.

The position reported by Islam Q&A, citing Shaykh Ibn Baz, is that Zakat is not to be spent on building mosques. The reasoning turns on Zakat being owed to the eight categories of recipients named in the Qur'an (9:60) — it must reach people, and a masjid is not a person. Several classical sources are cited to the same effect.

Some contemporary scholars read the category fi sabilillah more broadly and permit it, usually with conditions attached — for instance where a community has no other means, and where the other categories are already served.

I am not going to tell you which applies to your masjid. Ask your own scholar, with your own situation in front of them.

What a bookkeeping guide can tell you is what follows from the answer, whichever way it goes:

1. Whatever your scholar says, write it down — one line in the minutes naming what the Zakat fund may be spent on.
2. Keep the Zakat fund separate from day one. If you later find it should not have paid the electricity bill, a mixed balance cannot be unmixed. A separate one can be repaid.
3. Record who received it. If Zakat goes out to an eligible person, the record of that is the proof that it reached its purpose.

#What a record actually has to show

Most masjid notebooks record the amount and the date. That is half a record.

England and Wales charity law sets out the standard plainly, and it is a good one to borrow wherever you are. Under section 130 of the Charities Act 2011, trustees must keep accounting records sufficient to show and explain all the charity's transactions, and those records must contain entries showing from day to day the sums received and spent and the matters in respect of which that happened, plus a record of assets and liabilities.

Read that middle part again: and the matters in respect of which. Not just how much — what for.

So every entry needs four things:

• When it happened
• How much
• Which fund it belongs to
• What it was for, in words a stranger could follow

"Rs 2,200 — cleaning supplies — General — 16 October" is a record. "Rs 2,200" is a number.

The assets-and-liabilities half matters too, and it is the half masjids skip. You should be able to say, at any moment, how much is in the cash box, how much is in the bank, and what the masjid owes — an unpaid electricity bill, two months of the muazzin's salary. A balance that ignores what you owe flatters you.

#Never erase a mistake

Every treasurer makes errors. A collection counted wrong, an expense entered twice, a donation filed to the wrong fund.

The error is not the problem. Erasing it is.

The moment a past figure can change without a trace, every report becomes unverifiable — not because anyone did anything wrong, but because nobody can show that they did not. A committee that notices last month's total is different from the one they were shown has no way to tell a correction from a cover-up.

So correct forward, never backward:

• Leave the original entry where it is
• Add a correction that states what was wrong and what it should be
• Keep both visible in the history

This is also the single thing that protects an honest treasurer. If the record shows every change and who made it, suspicion has nothing to attach to. In a notebook, that means drawing a line through an entry rather than scrubbing it out, and initialling the correction.

#The report the committee actually reads

A monthly report is not a printout of every transaction. Nobody reads that, which means nobody checks it.

What a committee needs fits on one page:

• Opening balance — what you started the month with
• Income by fund — General, Zakat, construction, each on its own line
• Expenses by category — utilities, salaries, maintenance, not a single "expenses" total
• Closing balance
• Where the money sits — cash box, bank, mobile wallet
• Every restricted fund's balance on its own line

Two more things worth doing.

Count the cash, physically, on the same day each month. Then compare it with what the book says. A difference is not necessarily theft — it is usually an unrecorded expense — but you want to find it in the month it happened, not a year later.

Keep donors' names off anything public. A report pinned to the notice board or sent to a WhatsApp group does not need to carry who gave what and their phone number. The committee can have the detailed version; the community gets the totals. People give more freely when giving is not published.

#The handover nobody plans for

This is where masjid records most often die: the treasurer moves city, falls ill, or steps down after fifteen years, and the accounts leave with his notebook or his phone.

Plan the handover before you need it:

• A closing report showing every fund balance on the handover date, signed by both people
• A copy of the underlying records, not just the summary — the new treasurer needs to see last year, not a number
• The cash counted together, in front of a witness, on the day
• Bank access actually transferred, which usually takes longer than anyone expects

If the handover cannot be done in an afternoon, your records are too dependent on one person — and that is worth fixing while that person is still available to explain them.

#A note on the app I build

Disclosed interest: Amanah is mine, and it exists because of the system above rather than the other way round.

It keeps funds separate and will refuse an expense from a restricted fund that is not allowed to pay for it. Corrections are recorded rather than applied quietly, so the history shows what changed. It produces the monthly, fund-wise and yearly reports as a WhatsApp image, PDF or Excel file, with a public-safe mode that strips donor names and phone numbers. There is a cash count that compares the box with the book, and a handover that packages the backup and the closing report together.

It runs entirely on the phone, with no account and no server — the records belong to the masjid, not to me — and there is an optional daily backup to your own Google Drive. It is free: no ads, no subscription, nothing held back. It is in English, اردو, العربية, বাংলা, Bahasa Indonesia and Türkçe, with Hijri dates and any currency.

On the Zakat question it takes no position. You decide what each restricted fund may be spent on; the app only holds you to it.

If you take nothing from this page but "keep Zakat in its own fund and never erase a correction", that is most of the benefit, with or without any app.

#Frequently asked questions