Habits that keep the books honest
You’ll need: Transactions, Cash accounts, any accounting report — if you cannot see these, the module may be switched off for your business or outside your permissions. An administrator can change either.
The reports in this course are only as good as the recording underneath them. This lesson is the routine.
Daily or weekly
Record payments as they happen, with the right cash account and the right operation type. Every hour of delay makes the details less certain.
Reconcile weekly. Covered in lesson 4, and the single highest-value habit here.
Monthly
Run the trial balance and ask the three questions from lesson 7: do receivables look right, do cash accounts match reality, is there anything you do not recognise.
Run the three statements together for the same period and settings.
Check unpaid invoices and overdue bills. One is money you are owed and not chasing; the other is goodwill you are losing without deciding to.
Before anybody outside sees a number
Say which settings produced it. Chart of accounts, accounting basis, currency, period. A figure without those is not comparable to any other figure.
Check the journal for anything surprising. If a number changed a lot, know why before you are asked.
The four ways figures go wrong
Nearly every wrong number in this course traces to one of these:
- a payment recorded with the wrong operation type, so it landed in the wrong place
- a payment against the wrong cash account, so reconciliation will never balance
- reports compared across different settings
- something that never got recorded at all — the commonest of the four
None are found by staring at a total. All are found by opening the journal, or reconciling.
What FeePrime does not do for you
Being straightforward about the boundary: FeePrime produces reports from what you record. It does not file your returns, it does not tell you what is deductible, and it is not a substitute for an accountant.
What it does is make sure your accountant is working from records that match reality — which is most of what you were paying them to reconstruct.
You have finished
That is Cash & Accounting. You now know where money sits and why the account matters, how transactions carry operations and why the type decides the reporting, how budgets and reservations control spending before it happens, how imports and reconciliation close the gap with the outside world, the two settings that change every figure, that entries are derived rather than posted, and how to read the reports as a set.
The last course in the catalogue is Members & Membership, for organisations with members, contributions, loans and shared funds.
Keep staging.feeprime.com open as you go.