Accounting Overview

ParishCRM includes a full double-entry-style accounting module for a single parish: a chart of accounts, a transaction ledger, bank statement import, petty cash, budgets, tax-deductible giving receipts, and a set of financial reports. It is not a general ledger package — it models exactly what a small parish office needs: track income and expenses against categories, reconcile bank statements, track giving per family for receipting, and produce year-end reports for the parish council or auditor.

Using it

All accounting screens live under Accounting in the sidebar, visible only to roles with accounting access. The sidebar groups them as Books (overview, transactions, reconciliation, bank import, petty cash, dues, reports), Billing & Receipts (invoices, customers, receipts) and Admin (budget, accounting settings). Every financial report — P&L, Budget vs Actual, Balance Sheet, Trial Balance, Cash Flow, General Ledger, Reconciliation, Giving Summary and Fund Report, plus Dues — is listed on one Reports page (/accounting/reports). Who can do what:

Role	Can view accounting	Can enter/edit transactions	Can manage settings (accounts, opening balances, period lock)
ADMIN	Yes	Yes	Yes
PASTOR	Yes	Yes	No (view-only for settings)
OFFICE_ADMIN	Yes (read-only)	No	No
AUDITOR	Yes (read-only)	No	No
VIEWER	No	No	No
EVENT_ORGANISER	No	No	No

This maps to two helper checks used throughout the module: canViewAccounting (ADMIN, PASTOR, AUDITOR, OFFICE_ADMIN — read paths, reports, transaction list) and canAccessAccounting (ADMIN, PASTOR only — creating/editing/deleting transactions, petty cash entries, sending receipts). A smaller set of destructive or structural actions (deleting a transaction, editing the chart of accounts, opening balances, the period lock, payment accounts, funds, budgets) are ADMIN only.

The Accounting landing page (/accounting) is a dashboard: current balance per payment account (bank/cash), a quick summary of the current financial year’s income vs. expenses, and links into every sub-area below.

Sub-areas, each documented on its own page:

• Transactions — the ledger: entering, editing, categories (chart of accounts), funds, notes, attachments.
• Bank Statement Import — uploading an ANZ PDF statement, auto-matching members, splitting a line across categories.
• Reconciliation — matching the ledger to a bank statement, the reconciliation equation, period lock.
• Budgets — annual budgets per account and the Budget vs Actual report.
• Financial Reports — P&L, Balance Sheet, Cash Flow, Trial Balance, General Ledger, Giving Summary, Dues, Funds.
• Receipts — emailed transaction receipts, annual DGR (tax-deductible) donation receipts, and the Receipt Log.
• Invoices — invoices to members or saved outside customers, optional GST tax invoices, PDF and email.
• Petty Cash — weekly cash sessions, receipts/expenses/transfers, closing with a physical cash count.

How it works

Chart of accounts

• AccountGroup (prisma/schema.prisma): a named, typed (INCOME/EXPENSE) bucket used purely for grouping/sort order on reports — e.g. “Offerings”, “Facilities”. Unique on (name, type). Managed at /accounting/accounts/groups, ADMIN only.
• Account: the actual category a transaction posts against — code (unique, e.g. 4001), name, type, optional groupId, isActive. New codes auto-increment within a type’s range (4xxx for income, 5xxx for expense) if left blank. An account’s type must match its group’s type. Deactivating an account keeps its history intact everywhere (reports still include inactive accounts that have transactions in the period); deleting one is blocked while any transaction, budget, or petty-cash entry still references it.
• Managed at /accounting/accounts (view: canViewAccounting; edit/delete: ADMIN).

Payment accounts and funds

• PaymentAccount: a bank or cash account transactions are posted against (kind: BANK or CASH). Exactly one can be the default; only one active CASH account is allowed at a time (petty cash posts against it). Managed in Accounting Settings, ADMIN only.
• Fund: an optional secondary tag (e.g. “Building Fund”, “Missions”) independent of the account/category, so a gift or expense can be tracked both by category and by fund. The “General” fund cannot be renamed or deleted. A fund can’t be deleted while any transaction or petty-cash entry still references it.

Money handling

All money columns are Decimal(10,2). The codebase never round-trips a dollar value through a JS float: form input is validated against a decimal-places regex, then either the validated string is passed straight to Prisma, or amounts are summed in integer cents (toCents/centsToNumber/sumCents in src/lib/formatting.ts) before converting back to dollars for display. This avoids IEEE-754 drift accumulating across many small transactions, which would otherwise show up as reconciliation “off by a cent” mismatches.

Financial year

The FY start month is configurable per install via APP_FY_START_MONTH (src/lib/appConfig.ts), defaulting to July (Australian FY). currentFYYear() and fyDateRange() (src/lib/fiscalYear.ts) derive the FY from the parish’s configured local time, not the server clock — the server typically runs UTC, so a naive server-clock check would flip the financial year hours early or late at the FY boundary. All FY-scoped reports and DGR receipts use these two helpers.

Locking a period

An ADMIN can set an accounting lock date (Accounting Settings → Period Lock). Any transaction, petty-cash entry, or reconciliation statement dated on or before that date becomes read-only — no create, edit, or delete — enforced server-side in every relevant action (assertUnlocked / isDateLocked in src/lib/accountingLock.ts), not just hidden in the UI. This is how a parish “closes the books” for a period after it’s been reviewed.

Audit trail

Every accounting mutation — and every read of donor-identifying data (receipt sends, decrypted email addresses) — is written to an append-only AuditLog via logAudit() (src/lib/audit.ts). Report page loads log VIEW_FINANCIAL_REPORT; CSV/PDF exports log EXPORT_FINANCIAL_REPORT/EXPORT_TRANSACTION_CSV. This lets an AUDITOR (or the parish council) answer “who looked at what, and when.”

Configuration

Variable	Purpose
APP_FY_START_MONTH	Financial year start month, 1–12 (default 7 = July)
APP_TIMEZONE	IANA timezone used to derive “today” and the FY boundary (default Australia/Sydney)
APP_CURRENCY	ISO-4217 currency code used for formatting (default AUD)
APP_LOCALE	BCP-47 locale for money/date formatting (default en-AU)
CHURCH_NAME, CHURCH_ADDRESS, CHURCH_ABN, CHURCH_WEBSITE	Fallback parish identity used on receipts/reports until an ADMIN fills in Settings → Church Information, which then takes precedence