The credit card purchases screen is where you will enter the purchases and that are not paid by a normal vouchering process. Whenever possible you will want to create a normal voucher through the create voucher process. However some expenses you will write directly to an expense account, an example would be a gas purchase or restaurant meal, chances are good that you are not going to want McDonalds as a vendor. (Customer yes! but not vendor)
How is this Screen Different from paying a regular voucher?
In a normal payment scenario you will create a voucher to a vendor and then you could choose that voucher to be paid by credit card instead of check run. The vendor will have all the information needed to post the transaction correctly. But with credit card you will need to account for all the little purchases. Chances are good you will not want to create a vendor for each fast food restaurant and gas station that you frequent. This is where the credit card purchases screen comes in.
First you will need to create a vendor that these miscellaneous expenses will be applied to. The amount of vendors created depends on how much you want to know about your expenses. The example we use and that some have adopted is to create your company as a vendor account and to post your miscellaneous expenses to that account. With this example you could draw a crude parallel to the "petty cash" fund, but for expenses. Still others will want more visibility and they will create different vendors for entertainment, gas or food. Each vendor should post into an expense account that matches the vendor, entertainment expense GL– gas, expense GL, ETC. In theory you could just have one vendor and multiple GL accounts, we do support that, however you would be asking a lot of entry people to remember the different accounts.
To record the credit card purchase in the TRX Enter Purchases screen, you will need to choose the card that you made the purchase on, pick a vendor and add date. The vendor should have a default charge account associated with it from set up so the GL will populate in on its own. Then create a quick memo description of what the purchase was; for prosperity, and then add the amount of the purchase. Repeat this for as many transactions as you would like to add to this vendor and then press the process button.
This will be handled on the accounting side slightly different than most transactions. TRX will create a voucher, but because this has already been paid it will also create a check (not from your normal check run) and process it. This is done all in one-step. Because these transactions have been paid by the credit card already, an entry into credit card payables will be made in TRX, however to avoid AP aging on each individual entry a check has been created. This creates the situation below:
- The voucher will debit your expense account (6300 in the example) and credit Accounts payable.
- Then when the check is created the credit card payables gets credited and accounts payable gets debited.
This completed the cycle for this transaction. The transaction was recorded into your expenses and one payable was created for credit card payable instead of lots of little expenses. With all transactions posted you will now be able to reconcile your credit cards through TRX Enterprise ™.
Note: To purchase big-ticket items like equipment or inventory, you will be able to take advantage of miles or rewards, and you would use the normal vouchering process.