How can I tell in which accounts my various funds' cash balances are?
This article explains how you can track fund balances, without the need to track funds in their own separate bank accounts.
In this article:
Funds and bank accounts
ExpensePlus can account for multiple funds (whether they are unrestricted, restricted, designated, or endowment) and can also support multiple bank accounts. Your bank accounts may be across multiple providers (HSBC, Lloyds, Co-op, etc.), and for various purposes (current, savings, etc.) and may contain cash balances from across your various accounting funds.
If you need help understanding funds, see this help article for more guidance.
This blog explains why restricted funds don't need to be in a separate bank account.
For example, an organisation may have a restricted Building project fund with a cash balance of £150,000 and a General (unrestricted) fund with a cash balance of £35,000. Your current account balance may be £50,000, containing all of the general funds and £15,000 from your restricted buildings fund. This is perfectly okay. ExpensePlus is keeping track of your fund balances and the actual disbursement of the cash across the various accounts bears no relation to this - other than the total cash on your balance sheet (across all funds) must match the total value of all your Bank and Petty Cash Accounts.
Some organisations may like to designate a particular bank account for a specific purpose. For example, you may open a savings account for a Building fund and if you collect £150,000 you may prefer to have all of it (and only this balance) within your designated bank account. This is of course okay, but for accounting purposes it is unnecessary. Keeping track of which part of which cash balance relates to which fund doesn't add anything to your financial management. Where you want to match bank balances to fund balances, you can accomplish this by moving and reconciling cash via internal bank to bank transfers.
You can check all your bank account balances via this screen.
You can check your current Fund balances using the Balance Sheet report or the Fund movement Summary report.
ExpensePlus Financial Overview dashboard
Equally, if you use the finance dashboard, you can choose to view this summary instead of the diagrammatic workflow view.
Essentially, trying to keep track of which bank or petty cash account holds a fund's total cash balance really doesn't add anything. This is why ExpensePlus only displays the total cash balance of each fund for users (and of course, the total cash balances of all funds, always adds up to the total bank and petty cash balances of all your accounts as you would expect).
Each transaction in ExpensePlus is coded to a fund, enabling that fund's cash balances to update accordingly. If a transaction comes into the 'wrong' bank account (i.e. you have a 'building project' bank account and a 'general' bank account), this isn't an issue; you simply code the transaction to the correct fund (regardless of which bank account it is paid into), and that fund's cash balance will update without any need to waste time moving this money between bank accounts. You can of course move money between bank accounts should you wish to, and it's classed as a 'bank to bank transfer'. This has no impact on your fund balances as bank transfers are not income or expenditure.
To better understand the Bank Reconciliation module, please view the module overview video here.