I am trying to figure out how I can use this for a non-profit that receives donations. I end up depositing a number of checks at once, so the bank statement shows a single deposit amount. After importing the statement, i want to split the deposit among multiple customers. Normally I’d split into different accounts receivables, but I don’t have invoices to match it to, as nothing was sold. I don’t want to have to create fake invoices for every check, and then split the deposit to connect to invoices, as that seems like duplicate work. Is there not a way I can split the deposit to say X1 amount comes from payee1, X2 amount comes from payee 2? Also, it is important that I keep track of donations by customer as the end of the year I must be able to provide each customer with a summary for tax purposes, so I can’t just keep it all as a single transaction single payee.
All you can really do is this
You should be able to produce a Custom report to report the donations listed by person - you could then export this to Excel to produce individual receipts
You could also use Tracking codes but that seems a bit too involved
It looks like your example is multiple donations from one customer, which would be fine. But I would have multiple customers. If I did each customer as a receipt, then they’d show up on the bank account as individual transactions, and wouldn’t match up with the bank statement for reconciliation or statement importing.
If you want to setup your customer as individual sub-accounts, then you have to enter each donation as a separate payment. When you record the receipt, the bank will increase at the same time as the Donation account.
But there is no record of the donation in the customer’s sub-account as this is only affected by invoices and receipts against invoices.
I was showing you a way to avoid doing that at the expense of some extra work to extract the annual information required to produce a receipt.
That would be completely wrong accounting. Donations are not receivables. They should be posted to suitable income accounts.
Your donors are not customers. Trying to consider them as customers just to use various features of an accounting program will lead you down the wrong path.
Neglecting your determination to think of your donors as customers, why do you care about a single Manager receipt matching the overall deposit amount on a bank statement or manual deposit ticket? Your bank account will still reconcile, because the statement balance will match Manager’s balance. Unless your bank is very unusual, each deposited check will be listed individually, possibly even with images. You will be able to demonstrate the contributing donations that made up a deposit. Keep all the records together. No one will be surprised that a deposit of $500 included 5 checks for $75, $100, $200, $40, and $85. No retail store makes 150 separate deposits at the end of a day; they make one.
My bank statement just shows the deposit of $500 as a single line. If I am online, I can expand the transaction to see the checks that make up that deposit, but when I download it into manager it just brings in the single total. If the bank missed a check, I would know because the balance would be wrong, but I wouldn’t know which total was missing which check.
Forgive me if I’m missing something simple, because I am still fairly new to using manager. I’m used to quickbooks where I just edited the bank transaction to be multiple payees and accounts. Manager only allows multiple accounts per transaction, not multiple payees.
Maybe you should stick with Quickbooks 
Seriously though, each accounting program is different and has its strong and weak points. Hoping that one will adopt the features you like of another is wishful thinking.
Recording your bank deposits with a different line for each donator will enable you to do what you want. Put the name of the donator in the line description
I agree 100% with @Joe91. His first screen shot illustrates the concept well. I really cannot foresee any problems, even if your bank statements are limited in their detail.
Why not?
The important thing to identify is what they are actually buying.
- Funding of specific projects or
- A feeling of goodwill for supporting the overall donation business
Because they are not buying anything from the business entity. More to the point, their activity does not involve Accounts receivable, which is Manager’s governing criterion for a customer.
To your particular points, funding a project is not buying something. And seeking goodwill (from the public?) is possibly an expense, like advertising, but they are not purchasing the goodwill from the organization.
No it is not.
Invoiced customer sales result in entries in Accounts receivable.
Cash sales do not result in entries in accounts receivable.
Currently Manager does not include customer cash sales in customer reports. That part of your idea Improvement to payment and receipt forms was not implemented but a separate idea has been created suggesting this again Cash transactions not included on statements Hopefully it will happen sometime soon.
They most definitely are, which is the basis of the donation industry. What the donor receives is a sense of satiety and righteousness, often sufficient to discharge their feeling of responsibility. The service received is comparable to the feeling of insight into the future after seen a fortune teller. A service has been render for which there is a market.
Actually the donation does not actually need to help the theoretical recipient, the donor just has to believe it will. On close examination it often doesn’t, for example look at the injuries inflicted as part of the begging industry or the percentage of funds absorbed prior to the official end recipient receiving anything.
Which gets back too
Is the non - profit organisation taking funds for a specific project and has to demonstrate at least a set percentage is actually spent on that project. Or
In which case the donation would go into general revenue / business income.
To do that in Manager you need to create one transaction per customer. Either a sales invoice or cash receipt are possible. A sales invoice will enable it to show in a customer report. A Manager “Cash Sale” receipt will not show in customer reports with the current version of Manager.
If your donors were donating to a scheduled plan that would in fact be a very good way of doing it, using Managers recurring invoices. For random immediate sales Mangers “Cash sales” are indeed a more efficient way of entering the sales data. Unfortunately Manager does not currently include cash sales in customer reports.
You lost me on this one, @Patch. As I read your post, you seem to be saying the same thing I did. I was describing the current operation of the program. Under the current design, a transaction for which you do not raise a sales invoice does not pass through Accounts receivable and therefore the payer is not treated as a customer. From your further comments, I wonder if you are suggesting how the program might operate.
You may have described the basis for marketing in the donation industry. But I would disagree that, in an accounting sense, the donor has actually purchased any goods or services. The donor has not even purchased an intangible asset, such as goodwill, from the charitable organization, but is left only with their own positive emotion. That is the reason I conclude the donor is not a customer and should not be treated as one in accounting records.
The donation industry businesses provides a service. The service is to get resources to help a cause the individual paying the industry operator can not readily achieve on their own. The personal rewards to the person paying for the service are sufficient for the industry to exist.
And just the same as if someone goes to an accountant, receive advice, pays immediately and the accountant enters it via a Manager cash transaction. The person who received the service is still a customer despite Manager not currently reporting that transaction.
Accounting software has no way of recognising if a service provides a tangible benefit or not, it only records and reports on the transaction occurring.
Which is why paying club members or donors of a charity are customer just as much as people receiving advice from an accountant is a customer.
The implication of Manager’s current limitations is in any industry, if you want accurate customer reports now, all payments from customers must be entered via sales invoices.
It also works the other way.
A supplier is always a supplier regardless whether you pay by invoice received or at time of purchase.
You might think of suppliers that way, @VACUUMDOG, but that is not how they are viewed within the program. Suppliers are entities that are defined as suppliers in the Suppliers tab. Doing that establishes a subsidiary ledger within Accounts payable (or other designated control account). As with customer, the term supplier has a specific meaning within the program. You can buy things from another company for years, recording the purchases with payment forms, and that does not make them a supplier in Manager.
Interesting
So
- entering a customer in Managers “Customers” tab and
- Selecting contact type “Customer” on a receipt and selecting that customer in a “Cash sale”
Does not make them a customer in Manager.
or
- entering a supplier in Managers “Supplier” tab and
- Selecting contact type “Supplier” on a payment and selecting that supplier in a “Cash purchase”
Does not make them a supplier in Manager.
We have differing opinions on this.
I don’t think so. You have just added unnecessary second steps for both cases. Defining a customer or supplier in the respective tabs is what establishes them as one or the other. Until you do that, you cannot select them as such on a receipt or payment form.
But I should probably expand on what I wrote earlier. Once defined in the Customers or Suppliers tabs, the entity is a customer or supplier. But unless a transaction is posted to Accounts receivable/payable it will not show in a customer/supplier statement. So sales/purchase invoices and credit/debit notes are always included. But receipts/payments are included only when they are posted to Accounts receivable/payable. It would have been more accurate in my previous post to say, “You can buy things from another company for years, recording the purchases with payment forms, and that does not make them show up in supplier reports or statements in Manager.” And, of course, until the recent addition of payer/payee categories, cash transactions would not result in such companies being considered customers/suppliers in any sense. They were just text strings in a field. Now we have a shortcut for entering and standardizing those text strings, but the names aren’t really treated as customers/suppliers. As you already pointed out in an earlier post, that portion of my original recommendation was not implemented.
Didn’t realize I was creating such a hot topic discussion! But it appears the level of reporting I’d like to achieve isn’t the most convenient in Manager, and that’s ok. There is another software I looked at that has a donations manager separate from the accounting. You can list all the donations and funds/accounts they should go to, and then click create deposit and it bundles it all up for the accounting portion. I just say that to say that Manager doesn’t seem to be unique in it’s lack of being able to consider multiple customers/donors in a single transaction. Even in the other software purpose-built for it, the deposit didn’t mention any people, that was all handled outside of the accounting piece. Unfortunately, the other software doesn’t have a free version like Manager does
Putting each donor in the description on the line of the deposit would be too easy to make spelling errors/inconsistency. And I can’t figure out how to make a report that pulls from the line item description rather than the overall deposit description to have a report per customer that way. I’ll just have to keep track of the individual donations outside of Manager somehow. Maybe just excel.
For now enter an invoice for each donation. You may find batch create is an efficient way of doing this. Then a receipt type other to distribute the bank deposit to all customers.
In the longer term (when Manager cash transactions are included in customer reports) create a receipt from each customer for each donation. You will not be able to use bank import but will be able to use bank reconciliations to check daily aggregate totals.