====== About Funds ======

In the Acquisitions module, money is encumbered and expended through funds. Funds allow you to set and track spending for areas of your collection. You can define those areas however you like. It can be by collection (e.g. juvenile), by subject area, by format, by branch, by department. It can be a combination of these. It's totaly up to you.

===== Deciding on Your Fund Setup =====

Here are some questions to ask yourself when trying to decide how to organize your funds:

  * You may want to take into account how your bookkeeping is set up. How will you translate expenditures in Evergreen to your accounting software? Does this matter to you or do you just want to use your funds to get an estimate of what you have encumbered and what you have spent?

  * What will you want to pull statistics on? Expenditures for a branch? Expenditures for a collection? Expenditures for a format?

  * If you get processing done on materials, are processing charges billed to one particular fund/account created for that purpose or is that cost rolled into the per-item price?

  * If you have branches do you budget money specifically for your different branches?  If so, you may want to create funds for each branch.

  * If you would like to have funds in your grid codes on a vendor's site, Baker & Taylor’s TS360 for example, be sure to check with your vendor to see if there is a limit to the number of characters a fund code can have. The limit for Baker & Taylor’s TS360, for example, is 26 character per fund code. So name your funds accordingly.