Friday Feature – Journal Entry Types and Sources

School business produces thousands of journal entries every month. There are encumbrances, expenses, accruals, budget, cash, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. And, district offices need to review those journal entries on a regular basis, so Escape Online has numerous ways to filter JEs, but my two favorites are type and source. The type of the JE tells you how it affects account balances. For example, some common types are cash receipt and encumbrance. As you can see from the screen capture of the JE Type lookup, Escape Online supports more than a dozen journal entry types.

For the sake of time and space, let’s focus on encumbrances.

The encumbrance journal entry type is used to encumber (or hold) amounts until the account amount is ready for expensing. Encumbrance journal entries are created by Escape Online automatically as part of requisition and payroll processing.

In other words, an encumbrance can be created by a vendor requisition, department requisition, stores requisition, payroll processing, and position control. And, you could import an encumbrance too for hourly employees.

That’s a lot of encumbrances, and that is where the source comes into play.

The source of the JE tells you what process created the encumbrance.

So if we look at a list of journal entries, the Source column allows us to readily see where the encumbrance originated: a stores requisition (SR), a vendor requisition (VR) or payroll. And that is helpful information!

Yes, Escape Online has over two dozen ways to search for and filter your list of journal entries, but this two-step approach (type and source) really gets to the essence of the JE.