NESFA^® Treasury Procedures:  Paying Bills

Bills are usually paid the week they come in.  Most bills arrive by paper mail sent to our post office box in Framingham, but may also arrive by other means such as email, fax, or hand-carried. 

In the past, bills would occasionally be paid by a member and turned in on an expense report.  This practice is not preferred, but it still happens.  When such a bill is entered in a general ledger transaction by directly debiting an EX- account, there is no association with the vendor receiving the payment, and it makes it very difficult to find such a transaction in the future.  In order to make the association between the payment and the vendor, the expenditure must be recorded as a check, but it does not have to be a real check.  In such a case, a virtual check can be written in Peachtree.  See below for details.

For most bills, simply write a (real) check.  Attach the supporting documents (e.g., the bill (invoice)) to the check stub and file it in the appropriate fiscal quarter Bills folder.

When a bill is paid by an electronic transaction that causes a direct debit to our checking account (or to any other asset account, such as our PayPal account), use Peachtree to write a virtual check, but give it a fictitious check number of the form EPyynnn, where EP stands for Electronic Payment, yy is the fiscal year number, and nnn is a sequential number within the year.  When recording the check, make sure that the cash account is specified correctly.  Instead of printing the check, though, simply Save it.  Print out whatever document is available to file.  Such a document may be a faxed or emailed invoice or receipt (or both), or a receipt obtained using a web browser for bills paid online. 

If a member submits a bill as the only item on an expense report, use an EPyynnn reference number and treat is an electronic payment using the member's advance account as the cash account. 

When a bill is paid by a member and submitted on an expense report, and there are other items in the same report, separate the bill payment from the rest of the expense report, and write a virtual check as above, specifying the proper vendor ID, and using the member's advance account as the cash account for Peachtree.  Use the transaction number from the rest of the expense report as a fictitious check number.  Annotate the expense report to indicate that part of it was paid by virtual check and part by a general ledger entry.  Make a copy of the bill, manually label it with the reference number, and file it in the appropriate Bills folder.  Cross reference both the expense report and the bill parts to each other.

Rebates from vendors

Sometimes we get a rebate in the form of a check for money we have overpaid to a vendor.  Because we don't enter bills and pay against balances due, Peachtree never has a balance for a vendor.  If we were to recognize rebates from a vendor as income, Peachtree would show a meaningless balance on our books for that vendor.  Instead of that, assign a rebate check in a regular check deposit and credit account LI-Overpayments for the amount of the check.  Then, use the normal Write checks dialogue to enter a negative amount, and use LI-Overpayments as the cash account. 

This page is maintained by Treasurer at NESFA dot org.