We don’t do dues so I don’t have experience there. My thought would be to
do a bulk transaction from all Scout accounts to the Dues account - this
would count as everyone paying. Then if any of the Scout accounts go
negative, they would need to be replenished. Finding negative Scout
accounts would be easy to do, you would just have to dig to see why. This
would also allow dues payment to come from different sources that populate
the scout accounts - deposit, fundraising, reimbursements, etc.
I do similar entries for recharter, campouts and other activities requiring
funds. They should know if they have money in their account to cover the
cost, and I can see right away by looking at the balances on the main
screen (before or) after the transaction to see if there is an issue. Your
account goes negative? Pay up now or you don’t get to go. It seems to work
well, especially around recharter. (They can wait to pay, but then they
have to fill out another application because they won’t be included.)
Outside of this, the only other thing I can think of would be to track
manually in a spreadsheet or something. Yuck!
Thanks @cpdyer I think you’re on to something. We don’t really keep funds on deposit in the scout account but same concept will work. I can set up a transfer from Scout to Dues and that would put them all in the negative until I receive it, deposit it and transfer into scout account to make his account “whole”. I may do some thinking on an “uncollected dues” account just to keep my reconciliations in check. You’re mention of the multiple sources for funding does give me some ideas about how to structure our fundraisers in the future as well.
For those who use online deposits, does the Banking Activity (BA) method proposed by @cpdyer change? If I understand online deposits correctly, those funds are applied directly to an individual’s account. That seems to be desired outcome except there’s no corresponding transaction in the BA account to reconcile to your bank statement. Do you just reconcile these separately?
We’re not yet accepting online deposits, but we plan to in the future. We’re going to implement the above process now and just want to ensure we’re ready.