The key to setting up a restricted donation clearing account is found in how one or two settings are made in Theatre Manager.

Code Table Default Accounts

The two highlighted accounts below are what makes the automatic creation of G/L entries for transferring donations to the restricted account work.

• The first is the Donation-Bank Acct. Don. Normally Post To. which really should be the same account number as the operating account. When you look at a normal donation (second picture), you will see this account is placed into the 'Bank Account' field
• The second is the Donation-Bank Transfer Clearing Account. This will be an asset clearing account - which in general means that if something gets posted to this account, you will need to make a manual GL entry in your accounting system to get it moved from this holding place to the right bank account

 

Typical Donation - Non Restricted

This sample shows how the bank account is entered for almost every donation campaign. Typically these would be referred to as non-restricted. Theatre Manager will put any payments received against these donations into the operating account

 

Special Donation - Restricted

This sample shows how the bank account is entered for a donation that is deemed to be 'restricted' - meaning the money needs to be moved to a different bank account, or accounted for in some different manner. When the donation is paid for, Theatre Manager will create a clearing entry for you to this account.

Example of an order

This picture shows an order with two donations in it, one for each of the donation campaigns described above.

Sales Posting

When the sales posting is created, you can see that each of the donations is placed into its own sales/income account. This will happen whether or not there is a payment yet.

Deposit Posting

When the payment is received at some time after the donation is entered (it could be right away, or the payments for some donations can be received in installments), running the deposit process is intelligent enough to:

• Put the entire check into the cash account
• Decrease the receivables account like any other payment
• Add two special entries that offset each other
  • The first entry from Theatre Manager is telling you to put some money into the restricted bank account because a payment was received for the donation
  • The second entry is in the restricted donation transfer account. Normally the total value of funds in this account is zero. However, as payments for restricted donations are received, this account will increase in size. Theatre Manager tells you which donation the funds are for. At some periodic basis (daily, weekly, monthly), you will need to clear this account to zero. To do this, you go to your web banking and transfer funds from your operating account over to the various restricted accounts as identified by the clearing account.

Using this methodology, Theatre Manager makes it very easy to track special campaigns.