Transfers between Operating Accounts and Reserve Accounts are not technically expenses in accounting, which is why they don't show on the budget automatically. However, many organizations would like to show those transfers as an expense on their budget. Read below to see how you can make that happen!

To get started, you will need to have an expense account that you will use to show your transfers to reserves. We'll call that expense Reserve Contribution in this example.

To show your transfer to Reserves as an expense, you'll need to have two transactions, one showing the withdrawal from Operating, and one showing the deposit into Reserves. Both of these transactions should be categorized to your Reserve Contribution expense.

If your bank accounts are not linked and you need to enter one or both of those transactions follow the instructions in this article.

Please note that in the PayHOA system, when entering expense transactions manually, expenses are entered as positives, and incomes entered as negatives.

If you have the bank transfer already showing on your transactions:

Find the transfer in your Transactions > Open the transfer detail > Convert to a Transaction > Select Reserve Contribution as your category > Update.

That will create the "expense" coming out of the operating account, as seen below.

You then need to create a new transaction showing the deposit into the Reserve accounts, so that your bank account balances are showing correctly. Without this step, your Reserve bank account will be understated by the transfer amount.

Go to Actions > Add Transaction > Enter the Transaction. You'll want to ensure that you enter positive amounts as a negative. In the PayHOA system, expenses are entered as positives, and incomes entered as negatives. Select Reserve Contribution as your category and your Reserves bank account.

See below for how this will now appear in your transactions tab. You will notice that you now have two transactions, one showing the withdrawal from Operating, and one showing the deposit into Reserves. Both of these transactions should be categorized to your Reserve Contribution expense.

In this example, we've used $400 as the transfer amount. At this point, your cash balances will be correct, but the Reserves Contribution balance will be $0 since you have $400 going in and $400 going out. To show a $400 expense in that category, you need to exclude the green "income" transaction from reports.

Open Transaction Detail > Exclude. You'll want to be sure that you're doing this to the "green" transaction.

To update your reports, on the Transactions tab you can open Actions > Update General Ledger. It will take a few moments to update, then it will notify you that it has been updated in the upper left hand corner of the screen.

After the General Ledger has updated you can go to Budgets > and you will see the transfer showing under Reserve Contributions.