On 5/25/2017 11:05 AM, Anita Graves wrote:
I am astounded at the amount of help you dear people offer! Thank you very
much.
....... My only reason for wanting to ‘close’ the books was in order to
properly carry forward any account balances. In my case, I had some advanced
fund balances in the expenses as subaccounts and was hoping there would be a
‘magical’ way to carry these balances forward, along with the balances forward
in the asset, and equity accounts, but don’t think I know how to do that.
Stop right there.
I think you are mishandling how you are accounting for "dedicated
donations" (what I would call "restricted donations"). Formally
restricted donations are technically a liability, but you probably don't
want to go there. And you probably don't have separate bank accounts for
each fund. One (relatively) easy way to do this:
a) Make a parent for your bank account and make what is now your bank
account a child of that, Then create child accounts for each special
fund where the money is kept in your main bank account. You will be able
to reconcile against the statements from your bank by looking at the
parent total. You may have a little more work to do when entering a bank
deposit if being new, you don't want to mess with transactions split on
both sides (that's tricky). In that case, immediately after the deposit
(split on the credit side) you enter a transaction to transfer that
portion of the deposit that was restricted to the proper child(ren) so
could be split debit side.
b) Each time you pay an expense that qualifies for use of some
restricted fund money you again have a little extra work. The actual
check would be entered in the main bank account (debit the expense
account) but also transfer back that amount from the restricted fund to
the main account. Again, use two transactions if you find a two way
split daunting.
c) The adjustments (transfers into and out of the restricted children)
could be done periodically instead of as each happens. That is a "work
flow" choice. In that case you would use the total for the period
(quarter?) of "donations restricted building expenses" to transfer from
main account to the "building expense fund" child and the period total
of "building expenses" to transfer back from the "building expense fund"
to main checking. use your judgement based on the volume of transactions.
This DOES carry over accounting periods since accounts of type asset,
liability, and equity, are "standing" accounts.
Note that a Balance Sheet report will show your board what is the
balance of each of these dedicated funds at any given point in time.
Michael
_______________________________________________
gnucash-user mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user
-----
Please remember to CC this list on all your replies.
You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.
