Tracking money in and out

What this is, and what it isn't

It's a visibility tool, not your books of record. It exists so you can answer "what have we spent on printing?" without opening a spreadsheet nobody has updated since March. It does not generate filing artifacts, it is not accounting software, and it does not replace your treasurer.

The CSV export is the deliberate exit ramp: everything you record here comes back out in a form your actual compliance software or treasurer can use. Record it here for your own visibility; file from your real system.

Overview: raised against spent

The tab you land on. It puts both halves on one axis, because the question a campaign actually opens this page with — am I spending faster than I'm raising? — cannot be answered from two separate tabs.

Three numbers at the top: raised, spent, and the difference. Below them, a running total by month: the gap between the two lines is what you have left on paper. A month can go negative on its own while the running total stays positive, and the running total can cross below zero — both are shown as they are, in red, rather than rounded up to nothing.

The difference is not your cash on hand. It is raised minus spent from what you have recorded here. Electbase does not see your bank account, and a gift or a bill you have not entered is not in this number. That is also why there is no projection of how long your money lasts — that would be a guess dressed as a fact.

There is also a last-30-days line, compared against the 30 days before it. A campaign too new to have that earlier period says so instead of showing you a comparison against nothing.

Money out

Add an expense with an amount, a date, a payee and a category. Categories come ready to use — advertising, printing, staff, consulting, travel, events, office, fees and other — so the spelling stays consistent, which is the whole point when you later want a total per category.

Rows edit like a spreadsheet. Fix a typo, recategorize something, delete a duplicate.

Receipts

Attach a receipt to any expense — a photo or a PDF, up to 10 MB. It stays attached for as long as your campaign exists: there is no automatic deletion, and the only way a receipt disappears is you deleting it or the expense it hangs off.

On Rally and up, Scan a receipt reads the amount, date and payee off a photo or PDF and fills in the form for you. The file you scanned is held and attached to the expense when you save — one step, not two. If you change your mind before saving, discard drops it; if the scan can't read the receipt, you type the values and the file is still attached.

Keeping a copy in your own Google Drive

If you have connected Google, you can have Electbase save each new receipt to an "Electbase receipts" folder in your own Drive as well — useful when your treasurer or accountant works out of your Drive rather than logging in here.

It is a copy, not a move. Electbase keeps its own copy either way, so disconnecting Google or deleting the file in Drive never loses the receipt.

It uses the Google access you already granted under Connections, so there is no second sign-in, and it only ever writes files it creates — Electbase never reads anything else in your Drive.

On Rally and above, Electbase can also read the receipt and pull out the amount and the date so you're checking a filled-in form rather than typing from a crumpled photo. On other plans you attach the file and type the details.

Money in

You can record contributions by hand: who gave, how much, when. Money that arrives through a connected donation processor shows up here too, and the page always says which of the two a number came from.

Refunds are subtracted. If your processor reports a refund it appears as its own line, reduces the total, and is counted in the month it happened — not the month of the gift it reverses. So a month can go negative when a refund lands after the month of its gift, and the chart shows that rather than rounding it up to zero.

A refund is only subtracted when the gift it reverses came in here too. If your processor refunds a gift made before you connected it, that refund is still listed, marked not counted, and named on its own line under the total — but it isn't taken off, because that gift was never added. Subtracting it would make your total smaller than what you actually raised here.

Processor rows can't be edited or deleted here. They're a record of what your processor told us, and Electbase doesn't rewrite that; fix it in the processor and the correction comes through.

If you connect a processor that feeds contributions automatically, Electbase stops you adding new ones by hand for that source and tells you which processor is now the origin — two records of the same donation is precisely the mess this avoids. Anything you already entered stays, stays editable, and still counts.

One thing to know when you have both. Electbase does not try to match a contribution you typed in against one your processor reported. If you entered a gift by hand before connecting the processor, and the processor reports it too, it is counted twice. That is deliberate: guessing which two rows are "the same person, same gift" gets it wrong often enough that quietly merging them would cost you more than the double line does. The page tells you when both kinds are present so you know to look.

Currencies

Totals are in US dollars. If a row is in another currency it is left out of the total and named underneath it, with a count, rather than quietly dropped or wrongly added in. You'll always be able to see that something was excluded and what it was.

This applies to spending as well as money in — an expense in another currency is listed, is excluded from your dollar total, and is named as excluded.

Which plans

The Finance page is included on Rally and above, and so is reading receipts automatically.

Getting it out

Export CSV for both sides. That file is the handoff — to your treasurer, to your compliance vendor, or into a spreadsheet where you do the arithmetic your own way.