Managing sub-brands, sub-entities or specific areas / departments with settings

Many charities and churches operate semi-autonomous departments, sub-brands or sub-entities within their set-up - for example, unofficial mini-entities or specific areas / departments such as room hire, or a specific externally facing project with its own name and identity.

This article explains how to manage this within ExpensePlus, allowing you to create a single, unified set of accounts for the Charity Commission, while segregating (to a degree) the finances of each sub-entity for internal management and reporting.

Why have a single set of accounts with separate sub-entities?

Your ExpensePlus account is licensed to the single legal entity that constitutes your charity or church.

By using ExpensePlus to account for all your entity's financial activity, you will be able to prepare comprehensive accounts to fulfil your statutory responsibilities, in particular your reporting to the Charity Commission.

It's important that your accounts (and therefore your use of ExpensePlus) cover all your financial transactions, and the Balance Sheet, SOFA, and Fund Movement reports in ExpensePlus are designed to ensure this is the case.

Many charities and churches operate sub-brands or unofficial mini-entities within their set-up. These can represent semi-autonomous departments or specific 'wings' of activity. For example, your charity may have a room hire component, or a particular externally facing project with its own name and identity.

If the finances for this sub-brand belong to your charity, you will need to account for them within a single instance of ExpensePlus.

However, you may want to use one of the options below to segregate the reporting (to a degree) or to represent the finances in a different way.

Invoice Profiles

You can create multiple profiles to use on your invoices, allowing you to use custom logos, colour schemes, contact details, and footer text for each profile.

This will help a sub-brand retain its own identity.

Invoicing and logo profiles can be created in the Invoicing Settings screen. For more information, see Invoice profiles.

Specific funds

ExpensePlus allows you to create and operate multiple funds.

By operating a fund for a particular area of activity or ministry (such as Schools work, Conferencing, Book Shop, Food Ministry, etc.), you can produce separate Income and Expenditure reports and segregate user access.

You can create and manage funds here. For more information about funds, see our blog article Fund Accounting for UK Charities: Funds vs Bank Accounts Explained.

Donor Tags and Payee Tags

You may have donors who only give to one of your projects or sites. You may also have payees who only claim expenses for one particular sub-brand.

Tags help you identify which donors and payees are part of which sub-brand. You can add multiple tags per donor or payee.

Learn how to add and use Donor Tags.

Learn how to add and use Payee Tags.

Managing user access

You can customise user permissions and roles to specify which funds and categories any user can access and view.

By doing this in conjunction with specific funds and categories, you can enable users who have a restricted remit or limited area of responsibility to operate in ExpensePlus within their sub-brand or department.

You can customise user permissions and roles here. For more information, see How much can I customise user access?

Controlling access to specific bank accounts

If the specific areas or sub-brands use their own separate bank accounts, you can control access and visibility to these various accounts in the Bank Accounts settings screen. Click on the relevant bank account to set specific access permissions. For more information, see How much can I customise user access?

To help you understand how to customise ExpensePlus, watch the module overview video here.