Chart of Accounts

The Chart of Accounts lists your accounts and their balances as of the current date. If you want to see them as of another date, just type that date and click Reload.

Populi includes a number of built-in accounts. They include some standard asset, income, and liability accounts to help you get going right away. You're free to modify them as necessary and add new accounts.

Adding an account

Your Chart of Accounts in Populi should include any accounts that affect your school's receivables. This would include liability accounts for financial aid awards, income accounts for special fees or donations, asset accounts for different payment types, and so on.

1. Click Add Account.
2. Enter the account—this can be a number, abbreviation, a nickname...
3. Enter the name; this is the official full name of the account (e.g. Graduate Income, Dorm Fees, Corinne Fox Scholarship, etc.).
4. Select the account type. Your five options are Asset, Income, Liability, Expense, and Equity. Asset accounts let you further choose whether it is a Cash or non-Cash account.
5. Click Save to create the account.

Editing and deleting accounts

• To edit an account, click the link in the Account column. You can change anything about the account except for its type (for Accounts Receivable, you cannot change the name, either).
• If you see in the Retire column, you may retire that account. Retiring the account removes it from the Chart of Accounts and prevents any further transactions from being associated with the account. Past transaction account information will not be affected.
• If you see , you cannot retire that account. Such accounts are either connected to an automated billing process (tuition, fees, financial aid, etc.) or are otherwise essential to your finances (Accounts Receivable). Click the symbol to see a list of those financial items. If you wish to retire such an account, you'll first need to disconnect any active financial items from it.

Journal Entry

Journal Entries let you manually create a financial transaction that is not connected to a particular person or fee. These transactions simply transfer money between accounts.

1. Enter or edit the Posted Date.
2. Enter a Description (auditors love descriptions).
3. Select the account(s) to be debited and credited in this transaction. Use and to add and remove accounts you wish to include in the entry.
4. Enter the amounts to be debited and credited. I don't need to tell you this, but I'm gonna anyway: your total debits and credits have to be the same...
5. Click Save to complete the transaction(s).

Now that you've created the transaction, you can find it in the Transactions report.

General Ledger

General Ledger displays the debit and credit balances for all accounts with transaction activity during a given time period. The default time period shows the last month of ledger activity. If you wish to look at a different time period, use the filter.

The Summary view shows the cumulative debits and credits for each affected account. The Detail view shows the entries connected to each individual transaction.

Transactions

The Transactions report gathers all the different transaction types for a given time period. You can adjust the time period (among other things) using the filter.