User Support Forum

Hello,
I just got involved with our church's record keeping and the first thing I notice is that the Funds are out of balance. I reveiewed all transactions from the beginning of this fiscal year (7/1/08) through 11/30/08 to determine what was going on. Several Fund and Accounts Payable entries do not balance by fund. Some of the entries are either because they just haven't transfered the cash from the General Fund account to the Designated Fund account, or they just haven't recorded the transfer yet. I have five questions:

1. Apparently the software allows you to post transactions that don't balance by fund. Does it give you a warning? Is there anyway to force the system to either not allow this, or create the appropriate Due To/From accounts by fund?
2. I see no Due To/From accounts set up in the chart of accounts. Isn't this how transactions between funds should be handled???? Is there another way that I am missing?
3. Would you agree that I should set up Due To/From accounts, and make the appropriate journal entries to those accounts to balance the current year activity between funds?
4. I'm sure these unbalanced entries have been going on for sometime. Do you have a suggestion as to the easiest way to identify all the unbalanced entries by fund for all of history?
5. The beginning fund balances IN TOTAL do not balance ..... How can this occur? Do you have any suggestions on where I should start to look to correct this?

Thanks, I look forward to getting them on the right track,
ggibbar

I will try to answer your questions.

1). The software does give you a warning. It is possible that a previous user got the warning message and then checked the box saying "Don't show me this warning anymore". I'm sure there is a way to turn this warning message back on but I couldn't find any instructions on how to do this in the users manual. Perhaps someone else reading this post can tell us how to do this.

2). Transactions between funds should be handled with transfer accounts. The software has transfer accounts in the 9000 series set up for this purpose.

3). It depends on how the original entries were posted. You may want to reverse the original entries and then repost them so that they are balanced between funds.

4). Just run the Journal Report for each fund separately for the time period involved and then review the postings. You will see where there have been unbalanced postings.

5). Can you explain in more detail what you are seeing when you say the beginning fund balances in total do not balance? Are you saying that when you run the trial balance report for all funds that the Grand Totals don't equal zero?

5. I haven't run the Trial Balance for all funds, but I have run the Balance Sheet for all funds, and in the Total column, the Assets do not equal the Liabilities & Equity. How can this happen? Do you have suggestions on how I should go about finding and fixing this?
Thanks in advance,
gg

If you run a consolidated balance sheet for all funds and Assets doesn't equal Liabilities + Equity this may be due to converting to Version 9 or 10 from an earlier version of PC+. The older versions allowed you to make one-sided postings. If this was done and the records were transferred the out of balance condition also transferred. If this happened you could first look at the records in the older version to see if you can identify where the one sided posting occurred. However, I have a feeling that identifying this will be difficult. Your best course of action will probably be to validate the asset and liability balances carried forward from the old to the new version. Once these balances have been validated you will then need to do a one-sided adjustment to the fund balance account for the difference. To input a one-sided adjustment input "OOB" (that's letter O, letter O, B) in the first 3 digits of the reference field in Fund Accounting. Depending on your situation you may want to ask an accountant for assistance in getting these out of balance conditions corrected.