Fiscal years, Ledgers, Groups, Funds and Budgets

The main hierarchy of Fiscal years, Ledgers, Funds and Groups in Finance is as follows:

• Budgets are money for a particular financial year within a fund
• Budgets belong to funds
• 
Funds belong to ledgers.
• Ledgers will have multiple fiscal years


Funds can be assigned to Groups, and Groups work across Ledgers. So a Group can bring together information from funds across ledgers, and you can view summaries/totals for a fund group (across ledgers)

Funds can also have Types assigned to them, e.g. Approvals, Books, Gifts, etc.
 Funds Types work within a single ledger. 

Ledgers provide a way of strictly dividing up Funds if they need to generally work separately. You might use separate ledgers where parts of an organisation have a strictly distinct budget, or where you have a set of budgets on a different financial year cycle