Each month, do a mini audit on the books. You need to be sure that the software matches the money in the bank and that what the broker says we have, the software shows that we have and that all the transactions match up. Generally, all money in the bank will be petty cash.
This will help make sure that stock buys, sells, interest and dividends are credited correctly, and has made the last few audits about as painless as can be expected. You can expect this to take no more than half an hour, and you'd have to do it anyway to be sure that dividends and stuff were credited. (Paper statements are behind the online ones, and by the time a split shows up on the paper statement, we've pretty reliably held one meeting.)
Also check the number of shares on each stock to be sure that nothing split. You can do this at the broker, but also check against Yahoo, especially if a stock price looks very low. There will usually be a notice in the news items at Yahoo, but check the graph to be sure that what we bought the stock at matches up to what the price was when we bought it. (We've actually had this happen once or twice before. The broker runs 24-36 hours behind the market in crediting this kind of thing.) We got rid of all the DRIP stocks, so life is very, very good.
Once you're sure that the software is in alignment with balances at the broker and bank, then proceed onto the next step:
Put the valuation on one side, the members' status on the other and distribute. That's all.
It's going to be hard to tell how much money we have for stocks tonight, so find it and highlight it on your own copy, because you will be asked at least once per member. (The record is in the low thirties. Make sure you count, although since Jaspreet left, it's going to be hard to top it. Such are the amusements of the Treasurer.)
The purchase dates will be wrong stocks we bought before 1995 and it looked like there were some y2k issues in this area. There won't be a dividend column. Chances are you'll have a bunch of people demanding to know why the annual rate of gain makes no sense. ("Random gain generator embedded in software.")
We like to have a price history to use in deciding if the stock is on a slide or if there's some other issue. If I don't have a prices table to bring, I'll normally try and run a copy of the Yahoo site in "detailed" form, so we get a graph of the last year's stock prices.