Fund Feature issues.

[esmith]

I'm not making sense of the Fund features?  There seems to be no logical way to assign money to a fund.

For example, In one of my bands, there are 5 of us. We split each show fee 6 ways, leaving a full share for our Band Fund.

I can have a user receive the fee, and distribute it to the other members of the band but there is no way to simply allocate that a share go to a fund?

If I simply want to assign the entire fee to a fund I can't even do that because the software insists that I assign "Shared by" users...  None of which is the band fund.  Shouldn't there be some way to transfer money to a fund? 

Why can't I simply receive money directly into the band fund without assigning users?  It could then sit there until each member is paid out from that fund.

Why can't I pay out to the users a portion of the fee received and have the balance remain in the fund?

In order to make this useful to us,  I have had to waste a user account in order to make a dummy account for the Band itself so I could assign an equal portion of the fees to it.  That makes the user account a sort of fund all by itself... which makes me wonder why the fund is there at all since it hold absolutely zero useful function?

Is there a method that makes this work in any reasonable fashion? Although I can generally figure this stuff out, this isn't making much sense and I have a number of less tech savvy users who will be expected to operate in this environment and as it currently sits it really does not make any sense how it is supposed to work.

Can you please provide some insight on this?

[arlo]

Sometimes what you're thinking of as one transaction is really a series of steps that you would need to enter into BandHelper as multiple transactions.

In your scenario, let's say you get paid $100 for a gig and you want to pay a sixth of that to each of five band members, with the final sixth going into a fund. First, you enter the payment you received:

Type = Income
Amount = 100
Received By = you
Shared By = the five band members who played the gig

Then log the payments to each band member as distributions. In this case, each band member is due $16.67, but it's usually not worth taking the time to pay out exact amounts like that. If you pay them $15 or $17 or $20 each, BandHelper will carry the difference forward to the next distribution. So the easiest way to do this is go to the Finance > Totals page and click the Distribute button for each user who is owed a balance. This will open a transaction pre-filled with the following info:

Type = Distribution
Amount = current balance owed - you can then change this to a round number that you can easily pay out in cash
Paid By = you
Received By = one of your five band members

Then you can transfer the remaining sixth to your fund:

Type = Deposit
Amount = 16.67
Paid By = you
Deposited To = fund name
Shared By = the five band members who played the gig

Alternatively, if you simply want to put the entire fee into the fund, you only need one transaction:

Type = Income
Amount = 100
Deposited To = fund name
Shared By = the five band members who played the gig

Then if you want to pay the band members from the fund later, you can enter transactions like this:

Type = Withdrawal
Amount = amount given to each band member
Received By = this band member
Withdrawn From = fund name
Shared By = this band member

However, unless your fund is tracking a literal bank account, or tracking savings toward a large future purchase, I would skip the steps related to the fund. Your bandmates' money will simply appear as part of your personal balance until you pay it to them with Distribution transactions. So if your goal is simply to pay out to your bandmates less often, you could do the first step above after every gig, and the second step every few gigs, and you won't need the other steps.

Finally, when adding a transaction, look for the Defaults button at the top of the page. That will pre-fill the name, date and users from the most recent event. This saves a lot of data entry when you are logging multiple transactions, as long as you log them after each event.

[esmith]

OK, I will keep trying to understand but it is still a little convoluted.

What you describe, in your first two steps requires 6 transactions.  One to receive the income and one to each of the five band members as a distribution.

The problem here is that I do not want to assign the entire total, just 5/6th of it, but the software insists I account for the exact dollar value.  This means there can be no left over portion to deposit in the fund. How do I do as you describe?  How do I take $100, assign it to 5 people, and still have a portion left over if the software prohibits me from not being exactly on the penny?
 
In the third step, Depositing to the fund, what is the point of tracking shared by?  After paying the band members their agreed amount, And the balance remaining in my account.  Why can't I transfer it to the fund without adding shared by users again? What purpose does adding them resolve? Will this not result in each shared members account showing they are owed a portion of what is in the band account? The band account in our case is an island unto itself.  It gets paid just as we do and the band members do not get to claim a portion of the fund upon leaving.

In your alternate example,  The first step is clear,  The fund receives the income and we can designate everyone who is to receive a share. The problem however is that I want at this stage to be able to simply allocate 5/6th of the total amount and have the balance just remain in the fund. Because the software insists I account for the exact dollar amount I cannot simply have left over profit build in the account.

Also, the Withdrawal example does not make sense.  If I want to simply pay a member out of the fund, all I should have to do is specify the member that will receive the payment and the fund it will come from....  What point does adding shared by users serve at this point, especially when the shared by user is the exact same info captured in the received by field? 

Thank you,

[arlo]

The problem here is that I do not want to assign the entire total, just 5/6th of it, but the software insists I account for the exact dollar value.  This means there can be no left over portion to deposit in the fund. How do I do as you describe?  How do I take $100, assign it to 5 people, and still have a portion left over if the software prohibits me from not being exactly on the penny?

It sounds like you're trying to allocate the 1/6 share for the fund in that first transaction. If so, you're getting ahead of yourself. The purpose of the first transaction is only to show how much income the band had, not to show where it's going. You will log distributions of that income to your bandmates or to your fund, as well as any expenses required for that event, as separate transactions.

In other words, you should view the share values on the initial Income transaction as gross income, and let BandHelper calculate the net income for you when you pay distributions.

In the third step, Depositing to the fund, what is the point of tracking shared by?  After paying the band members their agreed amount, And the balance remaining in my account.  Why can't I transfer it to the fund without adding shared by users again? What purpose does adding them resolve? Will this not result in each shared members account showing they are owed a portion of what is in the band account? The band account in our case is an island unto itself.  It gets paid just as we do and the band members do not get to claim a portion of the fund upon leaving.

The Saved column on the Totals page will show how much each user contributed to all the funds. This doesn't mean users are owed that amount -- Owed is a separate column and only includes money that was earned by a user but was neither distributed to them nor deposited into a fund. The Saved column is there to provide a complete accounting of where the money went, and will hopefully generate some pride in how much a user's contributions have added up over time.

In your alternate example,  The first step is clear,  The fund receives the income and we can designate everyone who is to receive a share. The problem however is that I want at this stage to be able to simply allocate 5/6th of the total amount and have the balance just remain in the fund. Because the software insists I account for the exact dollar amount I cannot simply have left over profit build in the account.

I'm not sure what problem you're experiencing here. But I think the instructions I gave will do what you want to do. Please try it and if you get stuck, describe what you did and what step you got stuck at.

Also, the Withdrawal example does not make sense.  If I want to simply pay a member out of the fund, all I should have to do is specify the member that will receive the payment and the fund it will come from....  What point does adding shared by users serve at this point, especially when the shared by user is the exact same info captured in the received by field? 

The Shared By entered in this case would cancel out the Shared By that was selected when the money went into the fund, lowering the amount in the Saved column for that user. I'm wondering in what scenario you would pay a member out of a fund, though. If it's a delayed payment of money that was intended for them all along, it would be better not to put that into a fund, where any individual entitlement to the money is removed. Normally you would use a fund to pay for shared things like PA equipment or recording fees. But I suppose if you had a fund used for a specific purpose and once that purpose was completed, there was a bit left in there ... then it would make sense to pay the remainder out to the current members, logging that as Withdrawal transactions, and close the fund.