Expense Management Liability Accounts

Bonnie Cody

Has anyone dealt with setting up Expense Management using different Liability accounts for each Fund they use? We would like to move forward with the expense management and CC activity, but we have had zero help from Blackbaud customer service. We have been asking for weeks for help with this one particular question, and the answer we get is, “We are contacting someone who can assist you, someone will get back to you soon”. It's been weeks now and no one has contacted us. Is there anyone out there who can assist us?

Blake Paradise

@Bonnie Cody Hi Bonnie! So sorry to hear about the delay in response. For expense mgmt, I'd imagine you guys building out those expense categories by fund. For example, an expense submitter could see “office supplies - X fund”, “office supplies - Y fund”, etc.

For CC accounts, you can have a CC account set to a liability account. See image

Bonnie Cody

@Blake ParadiseHi Blake, thanks for your response. I get the expense management fund distribution, but when it comes to the credit cards, we have set up 3 different CC liability accounts,(Just like Accounts Payable)-one for each fund. For example, an expense for Operating Fund on the CC would go to 11-00-20130 Credit Card Liability, where an expense for one of the other funds would go to 22-00-20130 or 63-00-20130 And, each card holder can have charges for all three of our funds. We would need to be able to change the CC liability Accounts on each transaction for each employee. Is that doable?

Nikki Baldwin

@Bonnie Cody, jumping in here – while it seems we all understand that we can have multiple liability accounts defined in EM based on the expense, the issue is more on the CC side, if I'm understanding correctly. So breaking that down, there is only one liability account that can be defined on a Credit Card account (you can see this when you select to ‘Edit’ the Credit Card account). Ideally, you'd only have a card utilizing one fund so this wouldn't be an issue but as I understand it here, you must have the ability to allow one CC to hit multiple funds, including on the GL liability for that credit card account. Now this would all end up balancing within the fund, of course, still through interfund accounts that I'm sure you have set up. However, those would just be balanced via those transfer accounts and not on the specific liability accounts you'd actually need them on to show the in and out for that fund. So honestly, if you can't have a card per fund (and credit card account) then you'd have to utilize manual JE's to move the funds from the one liability account to the other(s) – and you'd want to make sure that the box is not marked to create bank adjustments to the cash account, should you decide to essentially reverse the transaction as a whole to move it to the correct accounts on both sides. You might want to consult with your auditor about what expectations they have there considering the constraints on the Credit Card accounts to only have one GL liability account defined.