Double entered Contributions and posted

[jimjokjv]

Hi All,
I am new to the forum and have a question for you. Our Treasurer just called and she discovered that she had double entered contributions for Wednesday night's service. Unfortunately she also posted them in both the contributions and fund accounting before discovering her error.
How can this be corrected? I believe the fund accounting error should just be a matter of entering a transaction to reverse the double entry but how do we remove the double post in the contributions module?
Thanks,
Jim

[JohnDMeyers]

This is one of those "been there, done that" scenarios.

What I would do (and have had to do) is to re-enter one set of offerings with negative dollar amounts. Make sure you use "Cash" or "Check" the same as the original entry (it used to matter, perhaps in the current version, not so much).

Make sure you use the same contribution fund numbers as the originals, too.

Then, post in Contributions and Fund Accounting. This will update everyone's personal contribution record so that they are accurate, as well as update Fund Accounting.

[jimjokjv]

Thanks John,
I didn't know you could enter negative numbers into the fund. I'll give it a try unless someone has a better way of doing this.
Jim

[JohnDMeyers]

I just tried it to make sure, but I have done it before.

If you enter env 200, fund 100, amount $100
(and post)

and then enter env 200, fund 100, amount -$100
(and post)

the individual's statement shows nothing (you do have to match "Cash" for "Cash" and "Check" for "Check" or the individual's statement will show the negative transaction, which is not good)

the "posted contributions" report shows both transactions.

Fund Accounting reverses the transactions automatically.

[beas]

I've been in the same situation. If you had a backup prior to the work done and haven't done a bunch of work since the error, you could restore to the last backup and start over. I guess it just depends on where your backup was done and how many corrections you have to make. Just a thought.

[Zorak]

An alternative to entering a whole day's Contributions as a negative, is to use the Delete Old Data option under the Contributions menu. If you delete the whole day (using the same date in both the "from" and "to" fields) you can then re-enter the contributions as you normally would.

The problem with entering negatives is that you have to enter each of them exactly as the original contribution was entered, or the contributors will end up seeing negatives in the detail on their Contribution Statements, which can raise questions.

As always, make a backup prior to using Delete Old Data, in case you have a problem, like deleting old data for the wrong date range.