When you make credit card purchases for campaign expenses, and then subsequently pay that credit card, you must do two things to properly report that expense:
- Report that credit card payment as an operating expense IF it amounts to over $200 in the aggregate to that cc company for the cycle/year.
- Report any specific expenses, included in the above payment, as a memo item, where expenses to any vendor exceed $200 in the aggregate for the cycle/year.
The CC disbursement should be entered like any disbursement.
- Go to finance
- Click the transactions tab
- Search for and select, or add as new, the credit card entity
- Enter the proper disbursement details
- Save
Step 2 is to enter Memo disbursement items for any entities where the expenses aggregate over $200 for the cycle/election. For example, if the CC payment above was for $1000 and included $250 to Starbucks for the month, you would need to create a Memo entry for the $250 because it exceeds the $200 reporting threshold.
To create a memo entry:
- Go to finance
- Click the transactions tab
- Go to Misc
- Create new
- Memo Entry
- Search for and select, or add as new, the respective entity
- Enter the proper details
- Enter memo text to explain the transaction. For example, in the example above, you might enter "Office coffee - part of 12/15 cc payment". This will appear in the memo field of your report.
- Click save
Do this for all expenses that were including (paid down/off) by the original CC payment.
For a more complete description of how to handle Credit Card Disbursements for the FEC reporting, please see this FEC article https://www.fec.gov/help-candidates-and-committees/filing-reports/credit-card-disbursements/