Habits that keep the books honest
Before you start, open these. They are all under Cash in the menu: Transactions and Cash Accounts, plus any report under Accounting.
Can’t find one? It may be turned off for your business, or your account may not be allowed to open it. Ask the person who set up your FeePrime. They can fix both.
The reports in this course are only as good as what you record underneath them. This lesson is the routine that keeps them good.
Every day, or every week
Record payments when they happen. Use the right cash account and the right type. Every hour you wait, the details get less certain.
Check your accounts against your bank every week. This was lesson 4, and it is the single most useful habit here.
Every month
Run the trial balance. Ask the three questions from lesson 7. Does what customers owe you look right? Do your cash accounts match the real money? Is there anything on there you do not recognise?
Run the three statements together, for the same period and the same settings.
Look at unpaid invoices and overdue bills. One is money you are owed and not chasing. The other is goodwill you are throwing away without meaning to.
Before anyone outside the business sees a number
Say which settings produced it. Which chart of accounts, which basis, which currency, which period. A figure without those cannot be compared to any other figure.
Check the journal for anything that surprises you. If a number has moved a lot, find out why before somebody asks you.
The four ways numbers go wrong
Nearly every wrong number in this course comes from one of these four things.
- A payment recorded as the wrong type, so it went to the wrong place.
- A payment put against the wrong cash account, so your bank check will never balance.
- Two reports compared when they were run with different settings.
- Something that never got recorded at all. This is the most common one.
You will not find any of these by staring at a total. You find them by opening the journal, or by checking against your bank.
What FeePrime does not do
To be straight with you about where the line is.
FeePrime builds reports from what you record. It does not file your tax returns. It does not tell you what you can claim. It is not a replacement for an accountant.
What it does is make sure your accountant starts from records that match reality. That is most of what you were paying them to piece together.
You have finished
That is the end of Cash and Accounting. Here is what you now know.
- Where money sits, and why the account you pick matters.
- How payments carry operations, and why the type decides where it lands in the reports.
- How budgets and reservations control spending before it happens.
- How importing and bank checking close the gap with the outside world.
- The two settings that change every figure.
- That the accounting entries are worked out from your records, not typed in.
- How to read the reports as a set instead of one at a time.
The last course is Members and Membership, for organisations with members, contributions, loans and shared funds.
Keep staging.feeprime.com open as you go.