What are Transaction Groups used for?
Transaction Groups provide an alternative way to view and 'slice' Income & Expenditure data for analysis. It's equivalent to 'Class', 'Department', or 'Tag' which are the names you might be familiar with in other finance software programs.
Most organisations don't need to use Transaction Groups since they are able to create the reports they need by just recording income and expenditure against 'categories'. However, Transaction Groups can be particularly useful for multi-site churches or multi-parish benefices, or where you need to track income and expenditure related to specific grants received as the expenditure may occur across multiple funds and categories.
Here is an example of how transaction groups could be used:
When putting on Christmas Services, a church might record the expenditure to several different categories. For example, the children-related expenses in one category, refreshments in another category, publicity in another, etc. as shown in the example below:
What if you want to get a report with all of the transactions relating to Christmas Services? (those highlighted in blue above)
In ExpensePlus, by creating a 'transaction group' called 'Christmas Services' you could then set all of the relevant transactions to this group. You could then use the 'Income & Expenditure (by Transaction Group) report' to view a breakdown of expenditure for the Christmas Services whilst leaving transactions themselves still part of the expenditure categories they belong to.
Transaction Groups allow you to view 'cross-category' income and expenditure as in the example above. If you want to view income and expenditure for several
whole categories, you probably want to use the 'Income & Expenditure (by Project)' report which allows you to pull together full categories into one report without the need to use Transaction Groups.
Turning on Transaction Groups
If your organisation wants to use Transaction Groups, they must first be set either as 'optional' or 'required' in the system-wide settings. The default setting is 'hidden'.
To do this, go to the system settings screen, scroll down to the 'system-wide' section and click the 'edit' button to the right of that section.
In the popup that appears, select 'optional' or 'required' in the Transaction Groups section to turn on Transaction Groups.
If transaction groups are set as 'required', users will then be required to enter a transaction group when submitting purchases, invoices and adjustments, and when they edit any existing income and expenditure transactions.
Users will need to manually update any existing transactions if they want these transactions to have transaction groups.
Setting up Transaction Groups
It is possible to create them with a specified opening balance or a zero balance.
Viewing the Transaction Groups report
Finding transactions without a Transaction Group
You can also find transactions which lack a transaction group by viewing your financial reports using the filter 'View Transactions without a Transaction Group'.
