Project tracking enables an organisation with more than one distinct activity to track income and expenditure for these activities separately.
This eliminates the need to create project-specific accounts in the List of Accounts, which can easily blow out the number of accounts used to unmanageable and confusing levels.
Note: to use the project function it needs to be enabled in the set-up sheet by selecting ‘yes’ under ‘Do you need to track projects/activities’ and then clicking ‘activate project module’.
You can also de-activate the project module again by clicking ‘no’ under Projects/Activities in the set-up sheet, and click ‘activate project module’.
Accounting 5 does not lose your project data when de-activating, and you can re-activate the module again at a later stage.
How does it work?
Activating the ‘project’ module inserts the ‘Project’ column into your transaction sheet, enabling to allocate transactions to a project.
A project report becomes available, where you can run income/expenditure reports for an individual project.
Example: an organisation runs an outreach service for youth, and also has a general counselling service, which it would like to track separately.
Instead of having multiple accounts to account for different projects, such as wages-counselling, wages-admin, wages-youth work, the organisation instead adds ‘Youth work’, ‘Counselling’ and ‘Admin’ to its projects, and has only one ‘wages’ account in the Account List:
The Projects list below can be found in the Accounts List tab next to Assets.
The projects can now be selected for each transaction in the ‘transaction sheet’
Version 5.1 onwards: Next to the green projects table you will find are darker-green shaded column headed ‘Opening balances’. If your project had an opening balance, enter it here. In the date field at the top, enter the date the opening balances apply.
From version 5.1 onwards, the project report will display opening and closing balances for the selected period. This allows tracking of ongoing ‘pots of money’ that are not grants, but may be internally marked for certain activities only.
In the Reporting tab, under Management Reports, a project can be selected for reporting:
Selecting a date range at the top of the Sheet, and clicking ‘Create Project Report’ will then display an income/expenditure report for this project or activity only.
What’s the difference to Grant tracking?
Grant tracking is mostly a tool for external accountability – it’s something an organisation must do, if they accept grants.
Project tracking meets an internal management need, to find out which activities make surpluses, and which are subsidised by others.
Sometimes a project is funded by only one grant, and that’s the project’s only income, but in most cases a single grant can be used for more than one project, or more than one grant is received for a project. Other income sources may supplement a project, such as user fees or specific fundraising. For this reason it is not a good idea to try and track activities or projects through the’ grant’ function.