Fund accounting: fiscal-year budgets, line accounts and the commitment lifecycle

For a government or nonprofit company that requires a fund on every line: budgets matched on the fiscal year (July–June and the like), AP and AR lines that keep their own accounts and cost centers, budget actuals by line, and a commitment that follows the requisition to the order and the bill and is released when any of them is cancelled.

These rules apply when a company keeps fund accounting (see Fund accounting and GL derivation rules). A company whose fiscal year is the calendar year behaves exactly as before.

Budgets by fiscal year

• A budget is matched on the fiscal year of the document’s date, taken from the leading ledger’s fiscal year start month. A year from July to June is named by the year it ends in: 1 July 2026 to 30 June 2027 is fiscal year 2027.
• The dashboard and its key figures use the same fiscal year when it does not start in January.
• The Cash position key figure, its drill and the dashboard’s cash movement read every bank account’s ledger account and the cash posting role, not one cash account alone.

Line accounts on AP and AR invoices

• An AP bill keeps each line’s GL account, cost center, profit center and PO line, as well as the header’s. Posting a bill that is not against an order books each line to its own account and cost center in its fund.
• An AR invoice keeps its line accounts, cost centers and profit centers in the same way, and posting per fund books each line to its own account.
• Budget actuals follow the posted lines, so each budget line shows what was really spent on it.
• A reversed bill takes its actuals back and no longer holds its supplier invoice number, so the corrected bill can use it.
• The AP list’s outstanding amount nets posted credit memos against their bill.

The commitment lifecycle

1. An approved requisition commits its amount against the budget line, on the requisition’s date.
2. When it becomes a purchase order, the requisition’s commitment is released and the order’s is committed. The order keeps each line’s cost center (and so its fund) and the requisition’s project.
3. Each bill against the order releases what it invoiced from the order’s commitment and records the actual.
4. Cancelling a requisition (now possible from approved as well), rejecting or closing it, or cancelling or closing an order, releases whatever it still has committed. Reversing a bill takes back the release it made.

A requisition or order that the budget blocks says so in full: what was requested, what is available and the budget line — for example “<Office supplies> exceeds available budget: requested <1,200.00>, available <800.00> …”. It names no document number that the refusal never created.

Goods receipts

Receive takes a bin, or a site and a bin there, and refuses a place that is neither; the dialog lists the bins. GR/IR posts per order-line cost center and fund.