Reserve in Budgets and Reports

Use this when you want to read your budget and your reports correctly once a property starts spending from its reserve. The headline: reserve activity is left out of budget figures, and is reported separately from operating.

Reserve does not touch your budget

Reserve activity is excluded from your budget actuals. That means it does not:

• use up a budget line,
• trigger a per-line over-budget warning, or
• carry over into the next period at close.

This applies whether your reports are set to cash basis or accrual basis. The exclusion is the same on both, so switching basis will not make reserve spending appear in a budget.

It holds in the two places it used to leak. The Actual column on the Expense by Account report now leaves reserve spending out, and so does the committed spend the year-end forecast projects from, so a large reserve project no longer inflates either one.

This is why a budget figure will not tie to a bank statement. The money left the bank; it is simply not being counted against the operating plan. Use the Reserve Fund Report, or the reserve side of the accounting dashboard, when you want the reserve movement itself.

Only Reserve behaves this way. Operating, Rent trust and Deposit trust all keep ordinary budget treatment.

Reading "Not counted toward budget"

When you tag an expense line Reserve, the budget note on that line changes to Not counted toward budget.

This does not mean the expense is missing or was not recorded. It means exactly what it says: the line is real, posted, and reportable, and it is simply not being counted against a budget. That is the intended behaviour.

Why reserve is kept out

Reserve money funds large, occasional costs such as a roof or a boiler. Those costs are not part of the operating plan a budget is built from. Counting a single roof replacement against the operating budget would make the operating budget look heavily consumed when day-to-day spending is on track, and would hide the thing the budget exists to show you.

On the dashboard

The accounting dashboard's Expense Summary widget shows This Month, Operating and This Month, Reserve as two separate figures, so a large reserve payment cannot mask what is happening in operating, and vice versa. Read both when you want total property spending.

Note that the dashboard's headline Expenses MTD figure is a single combined number. The split lives in the Expense Summary widget, not in the headline row.

On your reports

Operating and Reserve are reported separately throughout. The two trust funds are rolled up together and shown as a single Trust category.

The Balance Sheet and Income Statement now keep this same separation. A single cash figure on the Balance Sheet used to silently combine operating cash with reserve cash, and the Income Statement's Net Income line used to include reserve contributions. Both now report operating and reserve apart, the same way the rest of your reports already did.

If a total on either statement looks smaller or different from a copy you saved earlier, this is why. See Core financial reports for the Balance Sheet and Income Statement themselves.

The Reserve Fund Report is cash basis only, by design. It reports reserve money that has actually moved, not amounts accrued and not yet paid. The report itself carries a note saying so, so nobody reads it as an accrual view by mistake.

Related: What a fund is · How a reserve expense posts · Reading the accounting dashboard