Hi there:  It sounds like you are using hand-written manual cheques and not printing cheques out of the Simply program, correct?  If you just want to record the transactions from your cheque stubs, you can do the entries in the General Journal.  The entry for the cheque written to the charity would be a credit to Bank and a debit to the Charitable Donations Expense account.  If you need more information than that, come back with further questions.    Rita Deering

I have a question that relates - Our workplace participated in the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge and took up a collection among the employees to make a donation. I have an envelope of cash but am unsure of how to go about accounting for this, as we need to place the donation by either cheque or credit card. So somehow I need to record the entry showing that the cash taken in to offset the payment made out. Thoughts??

if the employees made the donation themselves then you would simply go to a bank and exchange the cash for a money order and mail the money order.

Or you could deposit cash into company bank account and then make out a chq for same amount payable to the charity. JE could be Dr bank for Cash and Cr bank for Chq with comment of something like 'ALS Bucket Challenge - exchange employee cash donation for company chq to ALS'.

Or if paying by credit card then deposit cash into bank and make a payment of exact same amount to credit card and then pay charity via credit card. Use same idea for JE as above.

In all cases make sure you document exactly the steps taken from cash collection to payment to charity. Print off all the journal entries and make copies of all related documents such as ALS bucket challenge letter etc etc. I would even have the employees sign for the amount they gave and attach that to the deposit slip (which should only be for the cash collected for this specific charity - nothing else should be added to this deposit slip)

While what Rita says is correct, I disagree with creating a GJ entry for this. If you make the entry in the purchases/vendor module, it provides much better tracking of cheque #'s, organization name, and you can use default expense accounts. Next year, when you want to see if you have donated to the organization before, you can look at the vendor account for the details.