End of year expenses

It is now into the beginning of the year and some organizations are submitting receipts from the end of 2019. Is there a way that we can appropriately categorize the expenses as being from the previous years budget? It doesn’t seem realistic that I would add an expense this year that was incurred last year.

For example we have a bill coming in for our ward Christmas party. Wouldn’t seem just to tack it to this year when we budgeted for it for last year.

Any thoughts ?

-Michael

We have a "prior year expenses" category that we put those into so that they don't affect the organization's current year budget.

Is it also possible to simply take that amount out of the "Balance Forward" from the previous year?

The Balance Forward category is not accessible by local users for expense or income transactions. It gets added to the 4 quarterly budget allocations, and transfers into Budget Allocations. Once the funds are there the amount can be allocated to any user accessible category.

I use the Miscellaneous category to allocate the rollover amount into and then debit the previous year expenses to that category.

jdlessley wrote:The Balance Forward category is not accessible by local users for expense or income transactions. It gets added to the 4 quarterly budget allocations, and transfers into Budget Allocations. Once the funds are there the amount can be allocated to any user accessible category.

I use the Miscellaneous category to allocate the rollover amount into and then debit the previous year expenses to that category.

How do you then reconcile each organizations budget from the previous year to know they stayed within their budget? I struggle with this since there isn’t a way to tie it back to which organization incurred the actual expense to get a historical view of how much each organization is actually spending if it’s being debuted from the Misc category.

cchang wrote:How do you then reconcile each organizations budget from the previous year to know they stayed within their budget? I struggle with this since there isn’t a way to tie it back to which organization incurred the actual expense to get a historical view of how much each organization is actually spending if it’s being debuted from the Misc category.

That's also a problem if you put them into the organization category because you can't tell which expenses came from last year and which from this year.

Generally I don't have that many expenses come in after the end of the year. It usually isn't too hard to manually adjust the numbers for the previous year by looking at each expense in the Prior Year Expenses category. You an add a note in the expense description to indicate the organization/category for those prior year expenses to make this easier.

Of course, the handbook counsels that organization should budget based on specific plans for the next year rather than just using historical spending. Historical spending can be useful to make sure that plans don't miss important recurring expenses but if budgeting is done according to the handbook it isn't the most important factor.

When I was clerk, each organization's budget would go to zero at the end of the year. They were cautioned that they needed to get receipts turned in promptly because if they did not it could affect their next year's budget. The organization heads were expected to manage their expenses and expenses their members were incurring. If they chose to not do that, that was their problem (we did have a "contingency" budget line that we set aside for special cases or if an organization when over-budget due to unplanned expenses - it was about 5-8% of the overall annual budget and it, too, went to 0 at the end of each year).