[GNC] Handling reimbursements?

[Adrien Monteleone]

Nate,

Here’s how I’d approach this.

If it doesn’t already exist, create an AR account as type ‘accounts receivable’. This is important, as assigning it that type, the Business Features will recognize and use it. (as opposed to just an ordinary Asset type account) Note, you can only have *one* account of type ‘Accounts Receivable’. (but you can have many receivable accounts as the generic asset type should you later find a need for them.)

Also create an account called something like “Accrued Reimbursements” of type Asset as a child of the new Accounts Receivable account. (making it a child will allow it to ‘roll-up’ to the parent AR account, so everything looks sane. It technically is AR, just not invoiced yet.)

Then create a ’customer’ entry for the other congregation.

When you pay the expenses originally, create a split transaction as such:

Dr. Accrued Reimbursements (the amount the other congregation is responsible for)
Dr. Expenses:whatever (the balance of the expense that your congregation is responsible for)
Cr. Cash/Checking, etc. (however you actually paid the entire expense)

This will build a balance in Accrued Reimbursements showing what the other congregation owes to yours that is still to be invoiced, and will also only expense your congregation’s share of the expense. (and reduce Cash/Checking accordingly)

When it is time to create an invoice, assign the line items to the Accrued Reimbursements account instead of an income account. Use the free form description to indicate different actual expense accounts/purposes. (such as if you are invoicing for "January 2020 rent" and "January 2020 utilities" on the same invoice, making separate line items makes it easy to see what the invoice was actually for should there be any question later.)

Post the invoice(s) to Accounts Receivable. Ideally, *do not* ‘accumulate splits’ in order to show all invoice line items in your AR and Accrued accounts. Thus you won’t need to open the invoice in the future to see what it was for. The individual splits have the info right there in the register. This also allows some custom reporting if need be on those splits that you can’t get if you use the ‘accumulate' feature as current reports can’t *see* inside invoices/bills. So if you later needed to run a report showing how much was invoiced in a year/quarter for a particular type of expense, you could do so.

This will transfer the amount invoiced from Accrued Reimbursements to Accounts Receivable. (thus, moving funds ’to be invoiced’ to ‘invoiced’) Whether you invoice the entire or partial balance in the accrued account at one time is up to you.

When they make payments, use the Process Payments feature to apply them to the relevant invoice(s).

This way, you can track their present amount still to be actually reimbursed (that you’ve invoiced and thus they know about) to your congregation. The Customer Report aka ’Statement of Account’ is available to keep track of this or give them if desired. (the new beta version of this report even lets you show which payments have been applied to which invoices)

Depending on how far back your books go, you can reasonably convert the manual transaction entries to back-dated invoices and process payments accordingly for their actual dates if you want your historical info to play nice with reporting. This will also allow you to more accurately reflect your congregations actual share of the expenses for the historical transactions.

When you create your budget, there is a feature to estimate amounts based on past transactions. If you’ve edited those transactions as noted to only reflect your congregation’s portion of the expense, then that will be the basis for the estimation rather than the entire amount paid out on behalf of both congregations.

Regards,
Adrien

> On Jan 17, 2020 w3d17, at 11:47 AM, Nate Bargmann <n0nb at n0nb.us> wrote:
> 
> What is everyone's thoughts on handling reimbursements received for
> ongoing expenses?  In our church arrangement our congregation pays
> various expenses through the month and then at the end of the month the
> other congregation is given an invoice and the payment is received.
> Conceptually easy.  I'll be creating the invoice from a spreadsheet for
> now as this is what the previous treasurer provided to me.
> 
> What I'm wrestling with where to put the amounts billed and the funds
> received.  The previous check, the one received for Dec 2019 I merely
> applied the receipts to the expense accounts but it seems not to be
> ideal when I run reports later in the year.
> 
> As I understand it, I could create an AR account under Assets and
> eventually generate an invoice from that and apply the receipts to it as
> well.  Am I correct?
> 
> To complicate matters a bit, our budget is currently structured so that
> the net of these expenses, i.e. total expenses minus reimbursed amounts,
> is our budgeted amount for these particular expenses.  Despite my
> question a while back I have not gotten back to the budget in GNU Cash.
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> - Nate