How do I combine two funds?

There is no automated process to combine funds, but there are steps you can take to combine them.  If you have a Fund that was created in error and should be combined with another one, decide which fund has the most Gift and Grant activity associated with it.  This will be the Fund that you keep.  Let us call this Fund “KEEP”.  The fund that will be merged we will call “MERGE”.

• You can choose to leave the gift and grant activity with each fund or do adjustments to move the gifts and grants to the surviving fund.  Doing the adjustments is advised, but for foundation reasons might not be practical or appropriate.
• For all of the gifts in the MERGE fund, go to the Gift History tab and adjust the Gifts, using the original gift date for both the reversing and the adjusting gift.
• Do the same for the grants using the original grant date for the grants adjustment date (upper left-hand corner of the adjustment screen). Process all the journals through to journal history.
• Run the End Of Year Closing process (File maintenance > General Ledger > End of Year Closing) for just the KEEP fund and then run it again for MERGE.
•  Do not check any of the boxes on the EOY closing process screen. Be sure to start the process back at the first year the when the two funds existed (or the earliest year of the adjustments).

This process will move the gifts and grants to the proper fund (KEEP) and will allow most outer module reports to reflect the gift or grant in the correct fund since it will see the original gift or grant and the adjustment net to $0.

The End of Year Closing process adjusted all the gift and grant GL activity over to the KEEP fund.

Depending upon what you want to see in the General Ledger, you will either journal out the investment earnings, admin fees and any other activity on an annual basis or you will create journals to close the fund out for the last year.

If you want all evidence of the MERGE fund to be removed, then you will have to do journals for each year.  Depending upon the complexity of the fund you can either manually create the journal entries or use the trial balance as a basis for the Import Journal Entries process.  If the number of accounts involved is small (under 10), then we recommend manually creating the Journal Entries.  If the Fund has more than 10 accounts, we recommend using the trial balance as a base and importing the journal entries.

• When you create the journals, you will be crediting (most likely) all of the asset accounts, debiting the liabilities and probably debiting the appropriate transfer accounts associated with the fund balances (see How to Close a Fund for further information) for the MERGE fund. Do the opposite for the KEEP fund.  This will transfer all the annual activity to the KEEP fund.  This can be done for each year or just done for the final year. 

If you are using the Trial Balance as the basis for this process, see How to Use the Trial Balance Report for more information.

Other considerations you need to think about involve spending policy and administrative fees if you use a trailing quarter calculation.

On a final note, if KEEP turns out to be the fund id you don’t want to have as the survivor and MERGE is, then you can always run the fund id change process to change the fund ids around either before or after the adjustments and journals have been made.  It might be faster to make the fund id changes before you do the adjustments and journals since there is less activity to change at that point.