User Support Forum

I am in the process of setting up my accounting for 2006, and I need help with entering previous balances for temporarily restricted accounts. How and where do I do this? What accounts are debited and credited? Any help would be very much APPRECIATED!!!

You will need to enter these balances in Fund Accounting under Enter transactions. The credit account will be the temporarily restricted equity account that you set up. The debit account will be whatever asset account (i.e. checking account, savings account, etc) currently holds those temporarily restricted assets.

Hi Matt,
By debiting the asset account, won't that increase my checking and/or savings account balances? Wouldn't that throw off my checking and savings balances in my check registers. I entered the transactions as: CR the income account and DB the fund balance. When I did an income/expense statement report it looked right.

The accounts that I am trying to set up are for designated building fund, van, memorial funds, etc. Money comes in designated for these funds which are entered into the contributions module. Once they have been posted, I write a check CR the checking account and DB the savings account. At this point I have not begun using the Transfer Accounts. I figured I needed to master the restricted accounts first. Probably unneccessary information, but I was trying to set up the balances for all of the temporarily restricted accounts that I have which had balances before January 1, 2006. I hope I haven't made all this so confusing!!!

Karin,
You are correct. I made an assumption as to where you were at in setting your accounting up and your response shows that what I assumed and what was actually the case were two different things

From the sounds of things it appears that you already have your chart of accounts set up and operating. That being the case, more than likely your restricted fund balances are currently combined with your unrestricted fund balance on your balance sheet. If so, to set up your beginning temporarily restricted account balances you would debit the unrestricted net assets account and credit the temporarily restricted net assets account for each temporarily restricted net assets account you set up.