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ENTERING TRANSACTIONS
Version 2024.02
Your Journal is where you'll enter all transactions for the year.
Six columns are required for every transaction:
1) Date: dates are evaluated to see if the date entered is within your fiscal year (based on the date entered in Settings). If the date is not within the fiscal year, the date will be highlighted in bright red (critical warning).
2) Contact: this field is a dropdown and will only allow contacts in your Contacts sheet. Add new contacts to your Contact sheet as needed.
3) Account: a dropdown that will only allow you to choose accounts from your Accounts sheet.
4) Fund: a dropdown that will only allow you to choose funds from your Funds sheet.
5) Amount: increases to cash should be entered as positive values, decreases as negative values. Most positive values will be to a revenue account, negative values to an expense account - if reversed, the amount will be highlighted in bright yellow (alert). This alert can be ignored in some cases (refunds, accruals).
6) Status: a dropdown field with two options: Posted (cleared) or Pending (not cleared). This is to track the transaction's status with your bank account and helps you reconcile your journal to your bank account.
Optional columns:
1) Check: record check numbers here if desired.
2) NTD: This stands for "not tax deductible". If funds received are not tax deductible for the giver, select NTD from the dropdown. Doing so will exclude the transaction from showing on their donor tax statement. These are often called "quid pro quo" where the donor receives something in exchange for the funds they provide, so are not tax deductible for the donor.
3) Notes: you can enter any details you like for each transaction in the notes column.
Calculated columns:
1) Journal Balance: this is a running total for your Journal. It uses the total fund balance from your Funds sheet as the starting point for the year. It is automatically calculated whenever a new value is entered in the Amount column. Even though it may appear there are no formulas in this column, it is controlled via a hidden formula. Manually typing data into this column will cause that formula to fail.
Tips and tricks:
Split transactions are very simple. Just use as many rows as needed to allocate a single transaction across any number of accounts or funds. Use the check and notes columns to indicate that the rows are all part of the same transaction.
For the Date cell, you can type the month/day, then hit tab on your keyboard to move to the next cell to the right. The date will automatically add the current year.
For all dropdown fields, you can click the dropdown icon to see the options listed alphabetically, or, just start typing any words (or numbers) contained in the record you are looking for. As you are typing, once the record you wish to select is in the top position of the dropdown, just click tab and the rest of the information will automatically fill the cell.
Use the tab button to quickly move through the cells, left to right - this is faster than fully relying on mouse clicks.
If you need to add a transaction that occurred prior to the last transaction entered, you can insert a row where it chronologically fits.
Or, enter it in the next blank row and re-sort your journal by the Date column. When you re-sort your Journal (or resize a column, format a column, filter by a column) a "Head up" pop up warning will show on your screen. This is because "protected" formulas will also be affected, but not in a way that causes them to fail. You can safely click "OK" when doing these things.
Or, don’t worry about how your journal is sorted. Transactions do not need to be entered or displayed chronologically in your journal. All reports will function just fine as long as the correct dates are entered. It’s really up to you and your preference if you want your journal sorted chronologically.
A few final things to note about the journal:
You may have noticed that many of the first rows are hidden. This is by design. There are several hidden functions and values in those hidden rows that make the reports work. Unless you are an advanced user, don’t unhide, alter, or delete hidden rows or columns. They are very important!
The journal comes with room to enter about 3000 transactions. If you get to the end of your journal, you’ll see a blue “Add” button. Type the number of new rows you want to add (1000 is the default) and click Add. Please note: adding more than you really need could slow down the calculation of some values.
Finally, the journal “freezes” the top “header” row containing the column labels. This is because you’ll be moving down hundreds of rows as the year progresses and it's helpful to continue to see the column labels. A common mistake for people unfamiliar with frozen header rows is to see the header row and assume they are at the top of their sheet and panic because it looks like much of their data is gone. Don’t panic. Just scroll back up. It’s all still there.
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