I have a club that receives as many as 400 receipts in bank payments with references that make it difficult to immediately post them to an income account. I would like to just post a bulk receipt rather than individual items to an unallocated income account. Most of the receipts will be for only one or two accounts and then a journal entry can make the necessary movements.
However sometimes a refund is made from teh bank before the accounts are updated and entering this into manager after the receipts have been addedThen I will need to the splits to their proper accounts later.
In the time lag between this step some of the receipts receipts may need a refund.
What is the correct way of achieving this a negativer receipts in unallocated receipts or a payment posted to an unallocated refunds account?
Import the bank statement and use a bank rule to allocate to an undifferentiated income account.
Or better still use several bank rules to auto allocate most of the receipts. With a more general rule later in the rule list to catch most of the remaining.
Or edit the appropriate receipt when the later information is available.
Giving a refund only where it is entitled is mostly a work flow question. You need to document it against a prior payment somewhere.
What you do in Manager is a function of what you are trying to achieve in Manager. I negative receipt to an income account (or a payment allocated an income account) will record the accounting transaction. (If VAT applies and you have a requirement the refund is reported as a negative sale or a purchase in gets more complicated).
If you want Manager to track the payment of the refund against a prior receipt from that customer you will need to enter the customer and invoices.
I agree with @Patch. Journal entries are unnecessary, no matter what else is required. Edit the imported transactions, either during the import process or afterwards using Find & Recode.
We organise Bridge competitions which people pay to enter. People usually enter a competition on our website with their name/bridge number. Sometimes they forget to do this and just turn up.
Following entry on out website they make Payments directly into our bank account prior to the competition. The people give a bank reference to themselves e.g. name/bridge ID number.
These are manually cross checked both at teh time of the meeting when they may pay in cash or on line afterwards.
We can receive money on 188 days. In April this year we received 470 receipts as lots of people were playing online Bridge, far too many to record each item and we do not want to replicate our bank account transactions in our management accounting system. Hence the need to aggregate them. In the same period we only had one refund to make. In the majority of cases online competition entry and subsequent bank payments work. People turning up without an entry pay cash on the day and people not turning up who have paid need a refund.
We do not want to create customer ID’s for all these people to create sales invoices and receipts, its just too much work in accounting terms when our manual checking identifies those small number of problems.
In accounting terms this is the problem I am trying to solve.
How to best move the money in the bank into the accounting system before we have checked/know what it is for. i.e. put it into an unallocated receipts account
How to deal with it afterwards. then journal it to the correct account.
Deal non payers who did not pay on the day
Deal with refunds to people who have paid but did not attend
Minimum complexity would be just to post receipts and refund payments against the income account.
We do not ideally want to create customers and suppliers with invoices or purchase orders the payments and receipts would happen outside an accounting period as they would be in teh wrong accounting period. Or should adopt the same practice every time? If so what is teh simplest process?
When you say a “holding unallocated receipts” account are you talking about an account on the Balance Sheet or on the Income accounts?
If it is the Income accounts why don’t just create the receipt and post the amount to the “Unallocated Income” and when you have the breakdown of the receipt go back and edit the receipt transaction by adding extra lines for the accounts you want to allocate the income too?
In fact, I would clone a template zero-valued transaction which already has all the income already defined and then it is just a question of entering or correcting the amounts
@Gally, you seem to be making things more complex than necessary. It sounds like the bulk of your receipts are entered automatically by players into your bank account. So why not just import your bank account periodically? This can be daily, weekly, or at irregular intervals as suits your needs. For those who pay at the door, enter a receipt manually. Use inter account transfers if necessary to move cash into your bank account. No aggregated transactions would be used. Each player would be the subject of a unique receipt.
Why all the discussion of unallocated income? You have not mentioned segregating income in any way. So why not post all income to an undifferentiated income account like Player fees via receipts, regardless of whether from bank statement imports or manual entries. If you have to give a refund, post a payment to the exact same account, where it will reverse the player’s original fee.
In short, no customer definitions, no invoices, and pure cash basis accounting (assuming that’s workable for your other needs). Even if cash basis won’t work for you for other purposes, it will work for this part of your operations.
As I am involved with a Bridge Club as well, I understand what Gally is trying to achieve.
It would be necessary to be able to identify the receipts for each competition or at least by day competition separately. So the total of receipts for Monday competitions, Tuesday competitions, etc
You could think of using Tracking Codes instead of having separate accounts
I hope I have understood the answers and outline my solution as follows.
Although these transactions are many and cash receied in the bank or by me there are others that appear, infrequently on the bank statement for other purposes. If I waited until everything was known the accounting system ould be lagging the bank statement by more than I would like.
So I want to keep the bank statement up to date with my workflow needs and not the people working out competition entries and matching payments.
So my proposal now is to aggregate all the receipts up to any date I work on this My bank reconciliations should then then report corectly at that date. Any other financial events likes purchase invoice cheques being issued or sales invoices paid will be likewise posted in the accounts. They are not many.
The people matching competition income work on the whole amount received not the chunks as I have posted them into the accounts. A journal entry for there financial competition money received report should clear the balances from the unallocated account to the correct competition account.
Thanks, for you input you have cleared my head on this.
To deal with end of year accounting period with known refunds of unpaid amounts I propose to journal the year end balances to a competition fees debtor/creditor account on the balance sheet at year end and post any preceeding year income or refunds to these accounts.
Your issue is essentially how to use Manager to document low value sales through and external point of sales system.
The options are:
Automate the data transfer from the POS system to Manager. Typically batch create, bank import rules or Manager’s API is used.
Aggregate the data based on the structure of your data source and import aggregated data periodically. This is likely to mean your chart of accounts has income accounts for “Sales online”, “Sales door” and possibly an expense account for “Door refunds”. “Sales online” should reconcile with the online system. “Sale door” should have an entry (receipt) for each meeting and reconcile with door taking records. Refunds can be posted to the same accounts or kept separate with the rare post identifying the individual transaction details.
Do all sales tracking externally and just import final results into a single Sales account (all sources and refunds)
The one thing you do not want to do is create new accounts for each event. You will have an ever-growing chart of accounts and will not be able to get rid of accounts once used. Accounts for categories/types of income are fine. Accounts for one-time events are usually a poor idea.