Electronic Funds Transfer Payments in LedgerSMB

When you reconcile a bank account in LedgerSMB, it will consolidate payments made on the same payment date with the same reference.

If paying a vendor’s invoice with a check, then this isn’t a problem. We want all the invoices that were paid with a single check to be grouped together.

However, if we make multiple payments via electronic funds transfers (EFTs) then this could be problematic. For instance, let’s say that we paid the following five invoices on the same date:

  1. The Home Depot $100.00
  2. The Home Depot $50.00
  3. KCP&L $250.00
  4. KCP&L $100.00
  5. Ferrellgas $300.00

If we use the reference EFT for all five of these payments, then when we reconcile the checking account, all five payments will be lumped into a single transaction on LedgerSMB’s reconciliation screen for a total of $800.00.

To solve this problem, we started appending the amount of the EFT to reference of each electronic payment we make. For the example above, this means we would have made three payments and use the following references:

  1. The Home Depot for $150.00 with reference EFT.150.00
  2. KCP&L for $350.00 with reference EFT.350.00
  3. Ferrellgas for $300.00 with reference EFT.300.00

Now when we reconcile the checking account, these three payments will show up separately, even though they were paid on the same date, since they have distinct references.

Notes