I have two cash accounts, we’ll call them “Cash on Hand” and “Cash at Bank”. The first one I set up to handle money going out; I purchase materials (or have any expense) and it credits the “Cash on Hand” account. The issue is I can’t seem to find a way to “receive” payment into the “Cash on Hand” account.
E.G. I send out a invoice and then I am paid, I want the incoming money to go into that “Cash on Hand” account. (Functioning as a checking account). That is impossible. Initially payments were going into the suspense account. I then enabled the “Cash Accounts” tab, created another cash account (Cash at Bank), and that solved the Suspense issue. Now my problem is I have two cash accounts. One with a negative balance “Cash on Hand” (where I have been debiting all my expenses), and one with a positive balance “Cash at Bank” (where I have been pushing payments).
Is there a way to do this with only one Cash account? If not, how do I reconcile the two accounts?
I apologize if something similar has been posted, I couldn’t find anything.
You didn’t say it explicitly, but it sounds like you created an ordinary account and called it a cash account. That isn’t how things work. And you cannot have a cash account with only outgoing transactions.
You are also going to confuse yourself and others with your account names. Cash on hand and Cash at bank are automatic control accounts in Manager. Their subsidiary accounts are, respectively, cash and bank accounts.
It also sounds like you might have been trying to enter everything with journal entries. (Again, you didn’t say.) In Manager, you cannot post journal entries to cash or bank accounts. Transactions involving movement of money into and out of the business must be entered in the Receipts & Payments tab.
Thank you for your reply, I already read those guides before coming to the forum.
I’ve set up a cash account under the cash account tab, its name is “Cash” but manager shows it as “Cash on Hand”, I’ll refer to it as “Cash on Hand” from now on. I had to set up this account as a way of taking money out of “Suspense” when I marked an invoice as paid (via making a Receipt).
I don’t wish to have separate Bank and Cash accounts. I don’t have a business bank account at the bank so I just want to operate everything out of a Cash account.
I posted my expenses via journal entries but my income is via invoices and receipts. When posting expenses via journal entries I debit an expense account such as “Materials” and credit an asset account such as “Cash, from bank” (I renamed the account to hopefully reduce confusion).
When I used manager for a business a few years ago a similar system worked. I had one Cash account which I used to receive payments and pay expenses.
While is possible to do accounting for a business in that manner, doing so is more difficult. The issue is you loose the ability to reconcile your bank account.
The easiest is to have a work bank account and put most work transactions on that. The exceptions then can be handled by journal entries (or zero value transactions).
An alternative is have personal Manager accounts as well and import all transactions, allocating personal business to the personal accounts in Manager.
Your profile tells us you joined the forum in February 2014. Back then, you could enter monetary movements with journal entries. You no longer can. The change that removed the ability to enter cash and bank account transactions as journal entries came in early 2015. The issue of sorting debits and credits was more than many users could handle.
So, yes, you must now enter a payment, purchase invoice, or expense claim to record expenses.