Sage Instant accounts

bowsie

Hi, 1st time posting so not sure if this is the right place to ask, apologies in advance. First of I am not an accountant but have agreed to take on "doing the books" as part of my job. It's been a steep learning curve thus far and I've only just gotten to grips with the ins and outs of double entry and with using Sage software. Having inputted opening balances and updated all transactions I've now been asked to produce reports which show separate expenditures from 4 different funding streams (we are an NGO and most of our money is from diverse grants). I've just included all incomes in the nominal ledger under grants received - how can I show these separated out - and the subsequent expenditures which are relevant to each grant/funding stream? I'd be very grateful for any help with this.

djk1000

Hey,

I did a quick google on instant accounts and it seems that it has departments. Crack out the sage manual and learn about it. Basically, everytime you record an income or expense you assign it to a department, use a different one for each stream, you can then break out the figures by department.

Herbalist

Hi Bowsie you have a couple of options which will depend on what software you currently have.

On Sage Instant Accounts you do not have departments.

Instant Accounts plus does have departments and will allow you to create a nominal report by department and audit trail by department. So in this case you would have one department which would be default i,.e. not a grant and the other departments could be named after the grants. When entering transactions you then specifiy on each what department it should be assigned to. You can then report by department to see what has happened with each of your grants

Sage 50 then adds some extra features on this. The first is advanced departmental analysis which allows you to run a profit and loss by department as well as an audit trail or a nominal report for each. You also create a budget for each department, run an aged debtors or creditors report on a department and many other reports.

One module that is very beneficial for anyone using grants is the charities module. If you are tracking grants you might find that this module is more suitable than tracking by department or you might choose to use both.
This module is available in all levels of Sage 50 from version 12 upwards. This module allows you to set up each of your funds, track all expenditure that is realated to the fund (this is seperate to departments too, so allows different levels of analysis), and then to run reports on these funds. You may be able to use this module to effectively track your grants showing what you spent and what it went on. The charities module is also sorp / sofa compliant. When I say track expenses related to a fund - what happens is when you enter a transaction, if you have set up funds you will see a fund drop down box will appear on transaction entry screens - you can choose to leave this blank or to enter a fund if the transaction relates to one

If you already have Sage 50, you can play around with the module by going into your demonstration company. To activate it go into your nominal module and you will see a button called 'charities'