Sage Intacct for Schools: Traditional Fund Accounting

The superintendent wants an update on the status of the General Fund. The finance committee is asking about the Capital Fund, and three different principals called before 9 a.m. this morning asking if they have room in their school’s budget for additional purchases.

Does that sound familiar? Does your education organization require financial statements for each fund and each school? Would you benefit from automated Due To/Due From entries between funds and schools?

In August I published Sage Intacct for Schools: Save Time with Inter-Entity Automation and discussed how you can leverage Sage Intacct’s automated inter-entity mapping to improve efficiency and help eliminate manual, error-prone processes when one school pays or receives money associated with a different school.

In this blog, I will provide some additional thoughts if you need to also track when a fund, such as the General Fund, pays or receives money associated on behalf of another fund, such as the Capital Fund. You can easily track both Due To/Due From balances between both funds and schools by enabling Traditional Fund Accounting in Sage Intacct.

Traditional Fund Accounting configuration

To enable Traditional Fund Accounting, navigate to the Accounting tab on the Company Information Page. Then select the radio button for Traditional Fund Accounting. (In order to enable Traditional Fund Accounting, your organization must be using the Nonprofit QuickStart Template.)

Dimension configuration

The dimension configuration in Sage Intacct is very flexible. To demonstrate how you can leverage Traditional Fund Accounting to automatically balance your funds and schools, let’s assume an organization has two funds and two schools.

Of course, you are not limited to only two. Most organizations using this configuration have a lot more funds and schools!

Creating combinations of each fund and school into one “Traditional Fund” (Entity), I created four different Traditional Fund (Entity) combinations by selecting Company > Add Entities.

I added the ID, Name, and other relevant information, and then selected the radio button for Type as Fund.

When setting up your funds as entities, take a moment to consider your ID convention. Identifying a scheme such as the one above, where the first 2 digits signify the fund and second 3 digits signify the School, can make creating dimension groups for reporting much simpler. See this blog post for other questions to consider when designing dimension IDs. 

Inter-entity mapping

Once you have defined your entities as funds, you can use advanced inter-entity mapping to define up to four separate accounts associated with the Due To/Due From between each fund-school combination.

Looking for more information on how inter-entity mapping works and different configuration options in Sage Intacct? See this blog post on Sage Intacct for Schools: Save Time with Inter-Entity Automation.

Reporting

Now that you have the configuration behind you, just a couple of more quick steps and you will be on your way with developing your financial reports to answer the superintendent, the finance committee, and all the principals’ questions! The financial reporting is easily accomplished using Dimension Groups.

Dimension Groups are a grouping of specific IDs within a dimension, like funds, and can be used in any report or dashboard filter drop-down menu in Sage Intacct. These Dimension Groups allow you to slice and dice your data by combining the Dimension IDs in whatever combinations you need.

Different Dimension Groups can easily be made for different reports. To answer the superintendent’s question about the General Fund, you can create a financial statement and filter it by a Dimension Group that includes all financial information related to the General Fund.

Dimension group creation by fund

To create a Dimension Group, select Reports > Setup > Dimension Groups > Add Fund Dimension Group as shown below. You can populate your funds by filtering on a field, such as ID, or manually selecting specific funds.

Once you add the Dimension Group, click on the Members link to verify that your Dimension Group includes the desired funds.

I can see that this Fund Dimension Group is comprised of the General Fund – School 1 and General Fund – School 2.

Dimension group creation by school

Similarly, you could also create a Dimension Group for School 1 that includes School 1’s General Fund and Capital Fund, by filtering on all fund IDs that include 101 as shown below.

Resulting members are shown below.

Filters allow you to leverage the same financial statements to answer different questions for different users. An even better way to leverage the filters is to give your users access to these reports and they can choose their own filters. Once they select a report, they will be prompted to enter the fund, and they can choose an individual fund or any fund group such as General Fund or School 1.

Remember, in Sage Intacct you can control users’ permissions, so they will only have the visibility to the data you want them to see! Enable your users to make data-driven decisions by accessing self-service dashboards, which can include reports. Check out my blog Sage Intacct for Schools: Data-Driven Decisions with Dashboards for more information.

Looking for a more comprehensive summary of your financials by fund? Creating a breakdown by fund is easy when you leverage Dimension Groups and Dimension Structures. Dimension Structures are similar to Dimension Groups but are used in either the rows or columns tab in the financial report wizard. See our blog post Sage Intacct Reports: Dimension Groups and Dimension Structures for how to leverage Dimension Structures in your financial reports.

Leveraging the Dimension Groups built for funds, the report below shows a breakdown by fund for all schools, but could just as easily show the breakout for an individual school as well.

Need a breakdown by schools? That is also easy to do. Show an individual school, all schools, or a select group of schools. The flexibility is practically endless!

Reporting tip

One of my favorite features of Sage Intacct financial reporting is how easy it is to expand your financial data. You can easily expand columns by funds or other dimensions. To understand more about expanding columns, see our blog post Intacct Financial Reports: Expanding Columns, Report Groups, and Scheduling.

How we can help 

If you are struggling with manual reporting for both funds and schools, Sage Intacct can help you automate the process when you enable Traditional Fund Accounting. Filter your reports with Dimension Groups and answer the superintendent’s questions on the General Fund, the finance committee’s question on the Capital Fund and all the principals’ budget questions with just a click of the button. Better yet, let users generate their own reports and dashboards on demand!

Interested in learning more about Sage Intacct for schools? Reach out to us.

You can also check out our Sage Intacct Webinar Series and blogs below:

• 2024 Sage Intacct Webinar Series
• Sage Intacct blog