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.

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 widget shows Operating and Reserve as 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.

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 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