The Set-Up page determines what functionality you need from the spreadsheet, and some necessary details such as your financial year and the opening balances of your bank accounts.
By default Accounting 5.0 comes with the minimum options. Note that it is perpetual – you do not need a new spreadsheet each year, just change the financial year in the ‘Your financial year’ section.
Your financial year: Enter the start and end of your financial year (for example 1 April 2022 for Start and 30 March 2023 for End). This is mandatory. If you come to the end of the year, you can continue using the spreadsheet by simply changing the financial year.
Your bank accounts: For each of your bank accounts, enter a name to identify it by, and the amount of money in the account on the day you start using our spreadsheet (‘Opening Balance’). For example one account name may be ‘Main’, with an opening balance of $3,923.15, and another may be ‘Savings’, with $20,000. Then click ‘activate accounts’. If you open another bank account, you can simply add it here later, with no opening balance.
Are you GST-registered? Ignore if you are not registered (or if you don’t know). If you are registered, select ‘Yes’, and then click ‘Activate GST formatting’. This will insert a ‘GST return’ tab into your spreadsheet and add other functionality in other parts of the spreadsheet. If you have done this by accident you can reverse this by selecting ‘No’ and clicking ‘Activate GST formatting’ again.
Do you need to track grants? Ignore this if you do not receive grants. If you do, you likely want to activate this function. See section 5 ‘Tracking Funding’ for more guidance. To do so select ‘Yes’ and then click ‘Activate Grant Module’. This will insert a ‘Grant’ tab into your spreadsheet and other functionality. If you have done this by accident you can reverse this by selecting ‘No’ and clicking ‘Activate Grant Module’ again. You can activate the grant tracking function at any time.
Do you have a budget? Ignore this if you do not have a budget that you want to use to compare your actual figures against. If you do want to do comparisons of your figures with a budget, select ‘Yes’ and click ‘Activate Budget Module’. If you have done this by accident you can reverse this by selecting ‘No’ and clicking ‘Activate Budget Module’ again. You can activate the budget functionality at any time.
Do you need to track projects/activities? This is different from tracking the funding that may fund some of those project or activities. Project tracking involves tracking income from all sources for a specific activity, and all its expenditure, regardless of how it is funded. This is useful if you have an activity for which you separately want to monitor its income or expenses. This does not affect your overall accounting at all. To use this functionality select ‘Yes’, and click ‘Activate Project Module’. If you have done this by accident you can reverse this by selecting ‘No’ and clicking ‘Activate Project Module’ again. You can activate the project tracking functionality at any time, and deactivation will not lose any entered data.