Oddball Expenditures or Miscellaneous Receivables?

By CarolCarrie / March 26, 2018 /
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What happens when you see a charge to a movie theater on the organization’s credit card and you realize this is probably not a valid expense? You talk to the staff member who made the charge and she exclaims, “Oh no, the organization credit card and my personal card are both blue and I pulled…

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Accounts Receivable Aging and Due Dates

By CarolCarrie / March 12, 2018 /
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Aging. Now there’s a topic we can all relate to! But I’m not talking about the kind of aging you and I experience each day. I’m talking about accounts receivable aging. The biggest difference is that accounts receivable, unlike you and me, do not get better with age. In our last post, Why Care About…

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Pledges Receivable and Accounts Receivable – Why Care?

By CarolCarrie / March 5, 2018 /
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“We have pledges receivable, but they are not on our books. Shouldn’t they be in our books?” Such began our consulting engagement with a local nonprofit organization, Spring Center (not the real name). Pledges Receivable and Accounts Receivable Our Chart of Accounts Grand Tour continues with the next type of account commonly found on the…

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Undeposited Funds

By CarolCarrie / February 26, 2018 /
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Normally every bank type account in your chart of accounts aligns with an actual bank account you maintain at a banking Institution. This is not the case with Undeposited Funds, an account that hides beneath many transactions you make in QuickBooks. This topic will be our last destination for Cash in our Nonprofit Chart of…

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Enter QuickBooks Bank Transactions the Easy Way

By CarolCarrie / February 12, 2018 /
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Who doesn’t want to save time on nonprofit bookkeeping? And who wouldn’t like to have more accurate financial reports ready more quickly each month? The trick lies in putting systems in place that enable you to work efficiently. The interesting thing about putting a system in place to do something efficiently is that you usually…

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Nonprofit Chart of Accounts Grand Tour

By CarolCarrie / January 15, 2018 /
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Nonprofit bookkeeping is simply coding transactions to the chart of accounts. What could possibly go wrong? Based on the questions we receive and the nonprofit clients we help, apparently a lot! Accounts Are Mandatory Every transaction recorded in your nonprofit’s QuickBooks (or other accounting software) must be coded to two or more accounts in your…

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Credit Card Deposits in QuickBooks

By CarolCarrie / December 18, 2017 /
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Do you accept credit cards donations or credit card payments for goods and services? If so you need to be able to record them in QuickBooks. Credit cards payments are normally not received by your bank until a few days after you’ve run the charge on the customer’s card. That means the credit card sales…

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The Problem with Duplicate Transactions in QuickBooks

By CarolCarrie / November 13, 2017 /
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Do you sometimes discover transactions entered into your nonprofit organization’s QuickBooks more than once? Twins are cute, but not in your books! Duplicate transactions cause your financial reports to be inaccurate and can be time consuming to fix. Clues that you have duplicate transactions can be found in your monthly bank reconciliation. Look closely at…

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Understanding Functional Expenses – Part 4 of 4

By CarolCarrie / October 23, 2017 /
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This post is the fourth and final (but probably not the last) in a series of posts on functional expenses. Actually five posts if you count the introductory post, Demystifying Nonprofit Overhead. Here’s a quick overview of the topics in each post: Demystifying Nonprofit Overhead: Deconstructed the term “overhead;” why you should care about it.…

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Understanding Functional Expenses – Part 3 of 4

By CarolCarrie / October 16, 2017 /
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This post is the third in a series of four posts on functional expenses. An introductory post, Demystifying Nonprofit Overhead, clarified the term “overhead” and made the case for why you should care about it. In Understanding Functional Expenses – Part 1 of 4, we covered the definition of cost vs. expense and went into…

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