Tailwind allows you to track incoming and outgoing payments in several ways. The Payables and Receivables lists show you the individual items as they are created in the system. Still, they do not necessarily tell you whether a Vendor has cashed a particular outgoing cheque or whether you have deposited an incoming payment. The Cheque Clearing and Deposits modules help you keep more precise track of your actual cash flow on an account-by-account basis.

The Cheque Clearing module lets you keep track of which of your outgoing payments – which of your cheques — have been received and processed by the Vendors you sent them to. This can help give you a clearer picture of your cash flow, including any outstanding cheques, and avoid being surprised by unexpected draws on your accounts.

To begin clearing your Cheques, start by navigating to the Cheque Clearing link in the left navigation, under Administration. This will bring up the Cheque Clearing page.

Every Cheque that Tailwind generates as part of the Bill-paying process is linked to an account, and the first step on the page is to select the account you want to reconcile. Next, select the account from the drop-down menu at the top of the page — this will bring up a list of all the un-cleared cheques linked to that account and the total amount of those cheques.

At this point, you will need to refer to your actual bank statements to determine which cheques have cleared the account. Comparing the statements to the list, mark the cleared cheques by selecting the toggle in the ‘Cleared’ column. Once you have marked all the cleared cheques, click on the ‘Save’ button to record the changes. Complete the same process for all your accounts.

The Deposits module is similar to Cheque Clearing, except you are tracking which of your Invoices have been paid rather than which of your Cheques have been cashed. There is also an additional step where Invoices are grouped into account-specific Deposits so that the system knows which account has received that particular payment.

A Deposit is a record made up of any number of Invoice Payments associated with a specific bank account and date. To create a Deposit, navigate to the Deposits list and click the ‘Create’ button at the top of the list.

This will bring up the Create Deposit page, where you can select the associated account and choose a date for the Deposit. This should be the date on which the payments will be deposited into the account. Once you have filled out the information, click on the ‘Create’ button to continue.

You will now see the newly-created Deposit record. The next step is to add the actual Invoice Payments to the deposit. First, click on the ‘Invoice Payments’ tab and select the ‘Add Invoice Payment’ button.

This will bring up a list of all existing payments (that are not already assigned to a deposit.) To add a payment to your deposit, click on the plus sign to the left of the payment line. Once you have added all the payments you want, you can click the button at the bottom to return your deposit.

There is no equivalent to ‘clearing’ a Deposit, as there is with Cheque Clearing. We recommend you only Create a Deposit at the point where the payments have been deposited into the account in question to ensure maximum clarity about your cash flow and account balance.