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Selectboard members flag QuickBooks reporting issues that hide grant accounts
Summary
Officials warned that default local-budget reports were excluding grant accounts such as 'Stone Garden' and 'Northern Borders,' meaning expenditures could appear in liability accounts and not on routine budget reports; staff arranged an accountant visit to restore editing and reconcile accounts.
Town officials used a live demonstration during the meeting to show how QuickBooks report filters can exclude grant-funded accounts from the local-budget view. A committee member (S4) pointed to a set of filters and explained that if an account (for example, Stone Garden) is not selected in the general report it will not appear in the town's local-budget output, even though transactions may have been charged to it.
"Anything checked here is gonna show up on this report... but if you've charged something to that and you don't have it checked, it's not gonna show up in the report," the committee member said, warning that some transactions were currently tagged to liability accounts rather than an expense account and therefore would not be visible in the report the board uses to judge available funds.
The clerk (S3) confirmed an accountant's copy is preventing some on-the-spot edits; S3 said the town has arranged for a new accounts specialist to visit next week to fix the lock and help re-tag accounts. "They're coming next week… that this needs to be fixed," the clerk said. Committee members recommended running a detailed profit-and-loss by month and reconciling vouchers against the clerk's totals every month so year-end mismatches are identified earlier.
Board members discussed immediate next steps: have accounting staff unlock the accounts copy, re-tag grant receipts and expenditures to the correct expense accounts for reporting, and run reconciliations monthly rather than wait until year-end.
