Liability Account for Pending Expense

[RLM]

I created a Liability account for an upcoming Ladies Retreat 04-2240-000 (Ladies Retreat Pending). Each deposit made by the ladies for their registration was credited to this account up until the date of the event when the check was written for the Motel where the event was held. After writing the check for the Motel I had $40.60 remaining in the liability account. The check was then written to the speaker for $100 (small town event) which drove us negative. To complicate this even more a late payment (after the event) was made in the amount of $25 which still caused us to have -$15.60 for the event.

I am not an accountant and rather than fumble around making improper transactions I wanted to see if anyone would be willing to help me account for this events transactions.

04-1140-000 CHECKING ACCOUNT
04-2240-000 Ladies Retreat Pending
04-6310-000 Speakers expense

Is anyone willing help me with this?

[Zorak]

It sounds like the check for the speaker should have looked like the following:

04-1140-000 checking (credit) $100.00
04-2240-000 ladies retreat (debit) $40.60
04-6310-000 speakers expense (debit) $59.40

To fix this without voiding or reversing the transaction that was posted, you could do the following:

04-2240-000 ladies retreat (credit) $59.40
04-6310-000 speakers expense (debit) $59.40

That basically adds the money back into the liability to bring it out of the negative balance.

Now that another payment has come in for the ladies retreat and you have already recorded expense, rather than recording income or adding money to the liability, this $25 would lower the expense that the church incurred in paying the speaker.

04-1140-000 checking (debit) $25.00
04-6310-000 speakers expense (credit) $25.00

I'm sure there are other directions to approach this from, but dissecting your e-mail line by line, issue by issue, I am pretty sure this would get you fixed up.

Others feel free to chime in here, though.

[RLM]

Thank you very much. It seems that I spend an enormous amount of time on transactions like this. You have been a tremendouse help & it is appreciated...