Many Councils hold reserves for special purposes. This may be because they are saving up for a future project or because they have received money from S106 or CIL that they need to segregate in their accounts so that they can prove to the District or Unitary Council that they have spent the money properly.
However, there are also many Councils who do not need this facility so it is important that adding the facility for some does not make life harder for the rest.
Reserves are in a sense the columns in the chart of accounts where Account Groups and Account Codes are the rows. If there is only one reserve (called the ‘General Reserve’) there will only be one column, but if there is more than one reserve, each reserve will have its own column.
Every Council has a reserve called ‘General Reserve’. If that is the only reserve they have, then the user interface will not be affected.
If required, the Clerk / RFO can add reserves and every transaction will be assigned to a reserve. If a reserve is created during a financial year it will be created with zero balance; funds may then be added either by transferring from another reserve or by recording a receipt to be allocated to that reserve. However, if a reserve is created at the start of the Council adopting the package it may be given an opening balance dated at the end of the preceding financial year, rather like the bank opening balance.
Every transaction is assigned to a reserve.Select which reserve from the dropdown input field to the page where receipts or payments are created; the field will not appear if there is only one reserve. The default will always be set to General Reserve to minimise the extra input needed.
Funds may be transferred between reserves. This is a bit like the bank transfer page. It is important to note that there will be no automatic correlation between bank accounts and reserves. If the Council wishes funds to be banked separately for each reserve then the user will have to keep track of this.
Reports such as the Annual Return will ignore the Reserve structure. There will be an extension to the Detailed accounts which allows either a consolidated set of figures, a separate report for each reserve or a columnar report that shows some or all of the reserves in separate columns. You can set up budgets for each reserve.