Using a Control Account

What is a control account?

Arbor Finance allows you to have an unlimited number of bank accounts. You may find it useful to set up a separate bank account for a specific set of transactions to help you manage these transactions more easily in the system. This would be what is known as a control account in Arbor Finance. An example of a common control account could be for your payroll transactions or purchase card transactions.

Setting up a control account

To set up a new control account, navigate to System > System Setup > Bank details.

This screen will display all of your current bank accounts. To add a new account click on the Add tab on the right of the screen. A pop up will appear for you to add the details of the account. As this is a control account you will just need to add the Account name and click Save.

Once you have saved the account it will be available to use straight away.

What is the purpose of a control account

Once you have set up your control account you will now use it to post all of the transactions of that type to it. In the example above we have created a purchase card control account. This means that all of our purchase card transactions will be kept separately in their own account for reconciliation purposes. This can make it much easier to manage these transactions when the purchase card statement is received.
 

Reconciling the control account 

At some point each month you will reconcile the control account and complete a Transfer of funds from your main bank account to the control account to keep the reconciled total of the control account at zero. Using the purchase card control account as an example please see the steps below for how to do this.

Once you receive your purchase card statement you would navigate to Transactions > Bank processing > Transfers.
Complete a transfer for the total amount of your purchase card statement. This should come from the bank account the purchase card expenses are paid from.

This transfer has the effect of creating expenditure in the bank account which the actual payment will be taken from (allowing you to reconcile this to your bank statement as one line in Arbor Finance) and also adding 'income' back into the control account to allow you to reconcile the account to zero.
You can now reconcile the individual transactions against the purchase card statement alongside the transfer you have just completed as shown in the screen shot below.

As you can see in the example above the expenditure transactions are all offset by the income transaction created by the transfer, keeping the reconciled total at zero. You may find you are not reconciling all of the transactions in the control account as some of them may be on next months statement.
You may find the recording below useful.

Balancing control accounts