NESFA^® Treasury Procedures:  How to choose a deposit number

The method of choosing a deposit number began very simply.  There were only two kinds of deposits:  checks and charges. Deposit numbers were constructed from the 6-digit date in the format yymmdd and followed by a letter.  On any given day, there was never more than one charge deposit, and it was given the letter A.  The first check deposit of the day was given the letter B, the second C, etc.

Sometime later, there were two different methods of having charge deposits:  from charges run through our own charge machines, and from e-commerce transactions.  It appears that some treasurer in the past abandoned the letter A and used C for charge transactions run through our machines and E for ecommerce transactions.  The letter A was then used for check deposits.  The letter P was also used in the past, but it's not clear for what.

Yet later, some treasurer started suffixing digits to the letters, so that 3 charge deposits in a given day (from 3 batches) were something like yymmddC1, yymmddC2, and yymmddC3. 

Other systems were also used.

In May 2010, the format yymmdd followed by a letter was still in use, and the letters indicated what kind of a deposit it was.  These are in use as of today: 

A - American Express batch (separated from a C or an E batch)
B - Check deposit (for Bank).  This kind of deposit can also include cash.
C - Charge deposit run through our machines
E - Electronic commerce (e-commerce or ecommerce or simply ecom) deposit
P - PayPal deposit (meaning the funds were deposited into our PayPal account)
W - Wire transfer deposit.
X - Any zero-balance deposit
Z - Direct deposit into our checking account (amaZon.com was our first)
$ - Cross charge to (generally) the current Boskone

Note that there are deposits that are not to our main checking account.  Care must be taken to insure that the correct deposit account is selected. 

Also note that usually a deposit consists of transactions represented by a single reference number, but can encompass transactions with more than one.  An example would be charge deposits when more than one batch (whether on a single charge machine, or more than one) occurs on a single bank day.  In that case, the bank record generally contains just one deposit, but it's made up of the funds from several credit card batches.  In such a case, one should strive to have the same deposit number for all the components of the one sum, regardless of how many batches comprise it. 

It was discovered that trying to search for deposits by year and month yielded extraneous results.  E.g., searching for deposits made in June 2009, using search string 0906, would list those, but would also list any deposit made on September 6 of any year. Because of that, the letter D is now prefixed to all deposit numbers.  The downside is that a digit can no longer be suffixed to the category letter because the length of a deposit number is limited to 8 characters.

So, e.g., an ecommerce deposit on 22 January 2019 would be D190122E.

This page is maintained by Treasurer at NESFA dot org.