Negative amount in account

I inactivated an account and I received a prompt that there was a negative balance from the previous year. How do I fix this? Or is that just how it is?

simonmudge wrote:I inactivated an account and I received a prompt that there was a negative balance from the previous year. How do I fix this? Or is that just how it is?

If there was a negative balance last year, there is probably still a negative balance this year that needs to be resolved. You cannot mark an account inactive unless the balance is zero.

How do I zero it out?

Transfer money into it.

I did inactivate the account and then reactivated it and the balance is gone by accident. Now what should I do?

simonmudge wrote:I did inactivate the account and then reactivated it and the balance is gone by accident. Now what should I do?

I don't understand how a balance can be "gone by accident." There has to be an actual transaction that changed the balance, if was negative at some point and now is zero.

You didn't mention what kind of account this is. Is it a Budget subcategory? Other? Ward Missionary? The way you fix a negative balance could very well be different for each of those scenarios.

But the first thing you should do is examine what has happened to the account. I'd advise you to do a detail report for that subcategory. For Other or Ward Missionary, That would be an Income and Expense Report, of type "Details by Subcategory"; select the correct subcategory, and set the Date Range to "All." For Budget, that would be a Budget Report of type Detail; check the box for the correct subcategory; there's no Date Range option for "All", so you'll start with the current year and might need to look back at previous years one at a time.

Examine the detailed report and you should be able to see the starting balance, the transactions that affected it, and the current balance. That should tell you what created the negative balance, and what recent transaction may have changed that. Until you have an understanding of what the real situation is with the category, it's difficult for you to make a good decision as to what to do to correct it.

Once you know what is happening with the subcategory, feel free to post a followup question. Make sure you mention the top-level category (Budget, Other, Ward Missionary, etc.).

Okay, I found it. It was a one time expense that probably should have come out of our Administration category. So now should I do some type of transfer? And how? It is not in the Other account.

simonmudge wrote:Okay, I found it. It was a one time expense that probably should have come out of our Administration category. So now should I do some type of transfer? And how? It is not in the Other account.

The easiest thing would be to just correct the expense that was incorrectly categorized. Just go to Finance > View/Update Expenses, find the expense, edit it and change the category. This will essentially create a transfer from the incorrect category to the correct category. The text you provide describing the reason for the change will be used as the description of the category.

This is generally better than just making a transfer because it ties it to the incorrect expense and give a better audit trail for what you've done.