What is the difference between Sweep Clearing Account and Automatic Cash Entries?

The two utilities are very similar, but the automatic cash entries is designed to move all of the positive balances in one account into another account OR move enough money from one account to cover the overdraft in the other.  Simple examples of this would be to sweep the excess gift deposits into the pool or to move money from the pool to cover the overdrafts created by cutting grant checks.  Typically you would run the automatic cash entry process several times in different directions to move all the money around between the various pools.  In either case, all the money calculated to move would move to one other designated account.

The Sweep Clearing Account process was designed to sweep the money into several pools at the same time to move gifts into the pools or move cash out of the various pools to cover overdrafts.  In this case though, the amount of money moving out of or into the various pools is based on the asset strategy codes and not on 100%.  It will also handle multiple source or destination accounts.

An example of when you would use the sweep process would be if the donor wanted their gifts deposited in the asset strategy ratio of 30/70.  Instead of having to calculate how much was going to Pool A and how much was going to Pool B and making that entry during the gift entry process, you could have all the money deposit to the checking account and when the sweep process was run it would move 30% of the cash into PoolA and 70% into PoolB.

Think of Automatic Cash Entries as a process to move 100% of the excess gifts into a single account and move 100% of the cash needed to cover an overdraft from one Investment Pool. Sweep Clearing moves a specified percentage into multiple asset accounts.  Asset rebalancing will take this process one step further and rebalance the entire balance of the pools into the 30/70 balances.  Sweep Clearing only adds or subtracts the money at those particular ratios.