Correct

Hi,

Thanks for that.

It goes some way to giving an insight into why the Fund (and department) for a customer receipt (etc) is not exactly pushed to the front (like on, say, a Journal entry where the Fund and Department have specific columns) but hidden away behind an icon - as the transaction only affects the Balance Sheet outside the fund reserve nominal it isn't considered as Fund Activity and so the fund is ignored.

Now I come to the thorny issue of unfunded transactions.

Back when my employer started using Sage (long before my time) quite a few of transactions went through without a fund assigned.

I assume that without fund accounting that Sage just gives every transaction a default fund of 0 and clears the P&L at year end to the Retained Earnings Control Account; I guess that with Fund accounting Sage treats them the same way - if a fund is unassigned for a [P&L] transaction (defaulting to 0) it ends up in the Retained Earnings without affecting any fund or giving any warning?

I've used Sage in many charity situations and fund code is used either fully or partially. What I've learned from this is that it is almost like a separate memo and the fund balances shown in the funds module do not necessarily correlate to the nominal ledger. The year end transfer is based on transactions, not fund balances, so I often see balances in the fund module that are way off (through improper use in the past), but it doesn't affect normal operation, reporting or year end.

If you use a fund code, at year end the balance is transferred to whichever B/S reserves nominal you have selected in the fund details.  If you don't use a fund code, the field stays empty, the year end balance is sent to the default retained earnings account defined in the Control Account settings. Unlike department code it does not set default as 0. If you leave the fund code blank it stays blank.

You can't change the fund N/L code once you've started using it, so if the funds transfer to the wrong N/L code, just journal to correct it after year end (from recollection you don't use a fund code for the journal but remember to check the balance in the funds module and if it's wrong, just edit the journal to add or remove the fund code).

Some of my charity clients use fund codes for every transaction (P&L only - I find B/S is a waste of time). Others have mainly earned income and only occasionally use fund codes for a restricted grant. You can have that mix and match - it really doesn't matter, unless you intend to use the fund B/S in which case you need to code every single transaction, which would be incredibly tedious.

I hope that helps.