Hi, I’m new to QF and just trying to set ourselves up. We are a Scout Group made up of 3 ‘sections’ (Beavers, Cubs & Scouts).
At the beginning of each financial year, we allocate spending budgets to each section, then track their usage of this budget per section for the events they run.
An event will generally have income (parents pay for their child to go) and costs (generally in the form of expenses incurred by the leaders). We wish to track the P&L of events, but also at the Section level (e.g. they may run 10 events a year as part of their allocated budget).
I think we can use Project tagging in the expenses by creating a tag for each event. However, I don’t know if I can tag the income (individual bank line items or DD entries) to the individual event (project)?
At the Budgeting level (multiple events per section), I wondered if I could track income and spend against this original budget view. I wondered if the use of an Estimate for each Section would work, then tagging this estimate to a Section. Is that possible?
If there is another way of achieving this hierarchy of section budgets and events then tracking expected and actual P&L against each, please let me know.
With income, you should ideally create a sales invoice for it to make it a bit easier to track (e.g. this allocates it to a client/source, a date, multiple nominal codes if needed and describes what it was). You could either create individual invoices per booking and issue one to each parent, or you could bulk enter them as daily or weekly takings.
Providing each invoice is for one event or section, you can use project tags on the invoices, whereas you can’t on a bank entry. So doing it this way would allow you to track the income/expenditure.
There isn’t a budgeting option in QuickFile, but if you have the budgets recorded somewhere, you can use the project reports to view the invoiced and cash totals and work from that.
Although I’ve not tried it myself, perhaps recording an adjustment against a project tag at the start of a year could help with this?
I just wanted to touch on this point. How do you process direct debits at the moment? The reason I ask is because QuickFile integrates with GoCardless, and allows you to collect direct debits from within QuickFile against a client or an invoice. If you were to issue invoices to the parents, you can set up a direct debit (in most cases done online) and request funds against an invoice.
I get the point about having an invoice for each income type, which can then be tagged - I think that’s workable as the main Subscriptions would be on a repeating invoice and the events could be individually invoiced (I might look for any Zapier integrations with our event booking system that could automate that).
On the DDs, we currently use GoCardless already for events but don’t have anything in place for subscriptions just yet (using standing orders) - we will probably move to this (probably with GoCardless) over the coming year. I think, given your answer on the GoCardless integration, this means the invoices that we raise (and tag) would be reconciled at the individual level due to the integration?
That’s correct. The way this would work, is you have a client with 1 direct debit mandate (linked with GoCardless). You can then request funds for this client or against an invoice raised against them.
You’ll also have a “GoCardless Holding Account”, which basically holds the funds until GoCardless deposits them in your bank account. So the sum you see in your current account (the sum collected minus fees) will just be tagged a transfer.
If you request the funds against an invoice, we’ll tag that for you once the funds are confirmed, and you’ll be able to see the progress of the direct debits from within your account too.