In this significant update, Cameo now offers accounting and trading. Accounting means book-keeping: the ability to record and attribute transactions to different account categories and report on them. Trading means preparing paperwork for invoices, purchase orders and quotations, receipts and expenses, sending them, paying for them and accounting for them afterwards. A new form, called shopping, for merchandise sales will also follow soon.
There are lots of new articles about these, summarised here with links.
Contents
Book-keeping and reconciliation
Reconciliation (attributing bank statement transactions to the appropriate membership, event booking etc) in accounting tasks → reconciliation has a new way of working. This is mainly because of the introduction of broader accounting functions.
A new chart of accounts provides book-keeping account categories to which you can attribute transactions. That lets you keep track of the purpose of items of income and expenditure, and report on them.
You can also attribute payments more finely. For example, recording not just donations, but by separate fundraising campaigns, or ticket sales by event type.
Trading documents
You can now:
- issue trading documents – invoices, quotations and purchase orders – from Cameo,
- send them, using templates
- take payments for them, and
- reconcile those payments (often automatically) when they appear as bank transactions, to book-keeping account categories.
New form: invoice
Complementing the introduction of trading documents (invoices, purchase orders and quotations), Cameo now includes a form type, invoice, for customer’s to access those documents using a personalised link. You typically include the link in the template as part of sending an invoice quotation or purchase order.
You can use the new form type for any or all of these:
- See a summary of the document
- Download a PDF of the document for the customer’s records
- Pay an invoice (e.g. by credit card)
- Mark an invoice as paid, add an interim transaction to account for the payment, and send a notification to that effect
- Accept a quotation (and send a notification to let you know)
A single copy of the form can deal with all of these.
Payment form update
When you indicate what you are using the payment form for, it can now record a payment automatically in the appropriate places. Previously this was a manual process.
Reporting on fundraising campaigns
Cameo can now automatically attribute payments made through its payment form to different categories from its hierarchical chart of accounts. This means that you can reconcile income from different fundraising campaigns, for example, to different accounts. That in turn means you can produce a financial report breaking down donations from different campaigns.
This article gives an example of how this works for fundraising campaigns.
Bank statement updates
- Cameo now presents bank statements a little differently in accounting info → statements and transactions
- Manual import of bank statements has also changed, in accounting tasks → import statements.
- Also in import statements, you can now add single transactions to bank accounts directly (no need to construct a CSV for occasional transactions).
- You no longer need to align financial year with calendar month.
Inventory and stock
Cameo now includes a trading → inventory and stock section where you define merchandise or services for sale.
You can:
- include stock items in invoices and quotations, which saves retyping the same details repeatedly
- include a thumbnail picture as an aide-memoire to the customer
- offer them for sale in the forthcoming shopping form.
Receipts and expenses claims
Cameo’s new trading → receipts and expenses claims section provides for:
- uploading and storing receipts
- attaching them to associated transactions
- submitting an expenses claim