why can't i post current month before closing prior month?

[camd]

Our organization has 11 bank accounts in 4 communities. It takes us up to 4 weeks to close a month. In the meantime, we cannot post any of our current transactions that are occuring in the current month. As a result, we have to resort to manual means to find out whether we can make our payroll or pay our bills.

This needs to be corrected! We should be able to post all our current transactions, even if the prior month is not closed.

A big help in this area would be to print detail reports on the Unposted Transactions - but it's not possible! There is only one really long list of unposted transactions. Flexibility in this report would at least allow us to create a manual report to find out our financial position.

Is this a concern for anyone else? This flaw alone cripples our ability to know our current financial position!
camd.

[Zaphod]

PowerChurch was designed with the idea that you would close your accounting month at the end of the month, then, when your bank statement comes in, you can post any additions or adjustments to the prior month. You can enter transactions for a future month, but you can't post them until you are in that month.

PowerChurch version 9 is being designed so that you can have multiple accounting months open at one time. Once you close a month, it's closed just like in the current version, but you will be able to post to any open month at any time.

I hope this helps.

[camd]

Thank you for your suggestion - I'll try it.

Thank you for changing this feature in PC9!

camd.

[camd]

If I close the month before I get my bank statements, and then post adjustments to the prior month, how do I do a bank rec? PC only does bank recs on the open month.

[Zoe]

The bank reconciliation actually doesn't care what month you are currently in. It is only looking at what transactions you have marked as reconciled and unreconciled. You could reconcile January transactions in June and they would reconcile fine.

[camd]

That's exactly the issue I'm talking about. If I close September, and post a bunch of October transactions, I cannot do a bank rec for September 30.

[Zeb]

Actually you can, that is the point of having unreconciled transactions. The way it starts is you have all the transactions that have cleared the bank as noted by your bank statement and noted in PowerChurch by Maintain Check Register. Then when you run the Reconcile the bank account it takes the balance your bank statement says (input by you), and plus or minus the unreconciled transactions, then gives you an adjusted bank balance which compares directly to the bank balance in PowerChurch. That way your unreconciled transaction (ie, future entered transactions) won't affect the difference.

For futher assistance feel free to call our technical support office at (800)486-1800.

[camd]

I guess what I'm trying to say is, that when I've printed out my Bank Reconciliation, I would like it to say "for the month ending November 30, 2003" with the outstanding cheques and deposits listed for THAT month.

You are correct - I can reconcile at any time. But when I compare it to a paper reconciliation, none of the figures (including the date) match with the Reconciliation. My October 31st reconcilation says "26/11/2003", so I have to scratch out the date and put "October" over it, not to mention that I have to disregard all other figures because they take future numbers into account. The fact that I cannot find out how many unreconciled transactions I had at month end has caused me many problems in reconciling.

It doesn't matter that unreconciled transactions don't affect the DIFFERENCE (as you said) - but they do affect the usefulness of the Reconciliation. The bottom line is that the Reconciliation is not useful because I cannot reconcile to a month end.