The Unit Ledger

The Ledger at /financials/ledger is your unit’s own set of books: every dollar that moves in or out of the troop’s bank account, with a running balance. It is separate from Scout accounts — money a family holds — and separate from payments, which is how you collect. The ledger is where the troop’s own money lives.

Note

The Ledger is available on the Peak plan and to leaders with the Financials.Manage permission — typically the treasurer, Scoutmaster, and unit admins.

Start with your opening balance

Before anything else, tell MySummitKeep what was already in the bank account.

Open Finance → Ledger in the left menu, choose Record Transaction, and tick This is our starting balance. Enter the amount that was in the account on the day you started tracking here, and the date.

You can only do this once. Everything after it is an ordinary transaction, and your balance is the opening figure plus every entry since. Skip this step and your balance will read too low forever — the dashboard will keep telling you it hasn’t been set.

Tip

Use the date and amount from a bank statement rather than a remembered figure. Your ledger balance is only as good as the number you start it with.

Recording money in and out

Choose Record Transaction and pick a direction:

• Money in — dues collected in cash, a fundraiser deposit, a reimbursement from the council.
• Money out — insurance, recharter fees, a campsite deposit, awards, gear.

Then fill in:

Field	What it’s for
Amount	Always a positive number. Use the Money in / Money out buttons to say which way it went — never a minus sign.
Date	When the money actually moved, not when you’re typing it in.
Description	What it was for. This appears in exports and in the audit log.
Category	Optional but worth doing — “Camping”, “Insurance”, “Awards”. Categories are what make your annual budget work.
Fund	Optional. Use it for restricted money such as a campership fund, so you can tell it apart from general funds.

Please don’t name individual Scouts in the description

Descriptions turn up in CSV exports and the audit log. Write “Reimbursed campsite deposit” rather than naming a young person. If you need to link money to a family, use Scout Accounts or an invoice instead.

Fixing a mistake

You cannot edit or delete a ledger entry. That is deliberate, and it is what makes the ledger trustworthy: a committee reviewing your books is looking at a record nobody can quietly rewrite.

Instead, use Reverse on the entry. That posts an opposing entry pointing back at the original, and asks you why. Both stay visible in the register and the two cancel out — so the balance is right, and the history shows what happened and when.

This is normal bookkeeping practice, not a limitation. If you recorded $50 twice, reverse one of them with the reason “recorded twice by mistake” and move on.

Note

An opening balance and a correction can’t themselves be reversed from the register — reversing a correction is how books get into a tangle. If one of those is wrong, record an ordinary correcting entry instead.

Finding things

The register is filterable by date range, direction, cleared status, and description text. Two states look similar but mean different things, so the page says which you’re in:

• “Start your ledger” — you have no entries at all yet.
• “No transactions match these filters” — you have entries, they’re just outside what you asked for. Clear the filters to see them.

Exporting for the committee or the next treasurer

Export CSV downloads exactly what your filters currently show — not everything, and not something different from what’s on screen. That means you can export “last fiscal year, expenses only” and hand over precisely that.

The CSV is the handover artifact. When a treasurer changes over, export the full register and give it to the next person along with the bank statements.

Reconciling against the bank

Reconciliation lives at /financials/reconciliation and answers one question: does what we recorded match what the bank actually did?

Deposits: several payments, one bank line

The commonest mismatch is that you took fifteen dues payments to the bank as one deposit. Your ledger has fifteen entries; the bank statement has one line.

Select those entries and choose Group as One Deposit. From then on the group is treated as a single item worth the total, which is what the bank will show. Everything in a group has to go the same direction — you can’t mix money in and money out into one deposit — and the button explains that if you try.

If you group the wrong things, Ungroup puts them back, as long as nothing in the group has cleared yet.

Marking things cleared

Mark Cleared records that an entry (or a whole deposit) has actually shown up on the statement. Cash and cheques never touch a bank feed, so this is how you reconcile them by hand.

Automatic matching

If your unit has connected a bank account, Import and Match pulls in recent transactions and proposes matches against what you’ve recorded. Nothing is cleared until you accept it. Where several of your entries could match the same bank line, the page says so and asks you to decide rather than guessing.

Never Reconciled shows bank transactions you’ve never matched to anything — across all time, not just this session. That is the list that catches a deposit you missed three months ago.

Related

• Financial Dashboard & Unit Payments — the overview screen and collecting from families.
• Annual Budget & Year-End — planning the year and closing the books.
• Scout Accounts — per-Scout balances, which are separate from unit money.
• Event Budgets — costs and income for one event.