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How do I? Index
Main Contents:
Welcome
Introducing hontreasurer.com
Online Manual
How Do I?
HELP! I'm Stuck!
TUTORIAL
The
Forum
TO DO List
How Do I? Contents:
Choose Activity Names
Print Labels or Form
Letters
I can't edit a
Transaction Field
Import existing records
Does the order of letters in
Label
Fields matter?
Print Labels or email People
who have paid for an Activity?
Produce Management Accounts
on a Spreadsheet with numbers from hontreasurer.com?
Post Contra Entries?
Set up and email only user?
Submit
Your Comments/Ideas
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Many new users
face the problem of how many Activities to put into their new system.
Extremes vary from one Activity to cover everything, which doesn't give
you much analysis of what the Income and Expenditure was, to a
different Activity for practically every transaction which goes in,
which makes it very difficult to read reports or leaves you having to
create huge numbers of Activity Groups to analyse anything.
A good starting place, if such a thing exists, is the existing accounts
or cashbooks. Except in larger organisations, these will show a number
of lines (or columns) with just income or expenditure headings. If this
is all that is required, simply create Activities for all the lines (or
columns) and the system will more or less reproduce the existing.
However, putting in a new system can be (or may be because) new and
better information is required.
The first extension to the simple layout above is when there are events
which have both income and expenditure and you would like to see the
profit. There are two ways of approaching this:
1.Put both Income and Expenditure on the same Activity. The reports
will then show the net income (expenditure) for the event.
2.If you want to show both the income, expenditure and the profit for
the event, create activities “event
Income” and “event
Expenditure” for income and expenditure respectively. Then create an
Activity Group “event” which contains both these activities.
The next level of sophistication is to record Activities at a fairly
low level and use Activity Groups to produce summaries. This is
typically the way that management accounts are produced for a committee
(or board) which is not concerned with the detail. The chief
difficulties with this are a) choosing an appropriate level for the
Activities, b) choosing the Groups, and c) ensuring that every Activity
appears in one, but only one, Activity Group. However, the beauty of
hontreasurer.com is that this can be a dynamic process because Activity
Groups can be changed at any time. Start by looking at the existing
cashbook and then add activities for all the things which you wished
you could separate. Then lay out the management accounts on one A4 page and create groups
corresponding to each line. In large systems, Income can go on one A4
page and Expenditure on another. Now create an Activity Group for each
line on the management report and add the relevant Activities to each
group as required. Finally, check that all the activities are in one of
the groups. Remember the difficult part is choosing and allocating the
transactions to Activities. The easy part is producing reports which
add these activities up in different ways.
Even more sophisticated is analysing the transactions in multiple ways.
This occurs when there are multiple events each of which having roughly
the same types of expenditure. A good example is Health & Safety
which will typically be a cost in every event. If you want to be able
to produce the total Health & Safety expenditure across all events,
then there must be a Health & Safety activity for each event. So
the activities will look like “event
- Health & Safety” and there will be one for each activity. Then,
as well as the normal groups which make up the Income & Expenditure
for each Event, there may be an Activity Group called Health &
Safety which comprises all the Health & Safety Activities. Because
this is a subsidiary analysis, it is important to check that all Health
& Safety activities are included because it is difficulty to
produce a cross-check for this type of subsidiary analysis. In addition
to all that, the person entering the transactions has more work to do
in identifying the Activity to post to – and more activities in the
list to choose from. The advantage is that the analysis is automatic.
The totals for Activity Groups are easily removed to a spreadsheet with
the Copy/Paste function. hontreasurer.com does not attempt to reinvent
the extraordinary presentation facilities available in spreadsheets.
The basic system of pasting the data from Activity Groups (or
Activities or Accounting Categories or Contacts) into a “data” sheet on
a spreadsheet and then using the “lookup” functions to transfer these
numbers onto a “presentation“ sheet is one of the most powerful
features of hontreasurer.com. See also How
to Produce Management Accounts.
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