Tranches, conditions and what "received" means

This page is for funders and for partner organisations who receive money
from us. It explains how payments in and out are tracked.

A planned payment is not money

A payment on a schedule is a forecast. It does not change what any
programme can spend, and it never will until it has actually arrived and
been posted to the fund.

This sounds obvious and is the single commonest way grant systems
overstate what an organisation has.

The stages

• Planned. On the schedule. A forecast.
• Conditions pending. Something has to happen first: a report accepted, a milestone verified, an earlier advance liquidated.
• Eligible. Every condition is met.
• Requested. Asked for, or authorised for release. Nothing has moved.
• In transit. Somebody says it has been sent. Not yet seen on a statement.
• Received. Matched to a verified bank statement line. A bank fact.
• Allocated. Posted to the fund under its restrictions. Only now is it available to spend.
• Unknown. Nobody can tell whether it moved.

Received and allocated are not the same

Money arriving is something the bank did. Money becoming spendable is a
decision we make, under the restrictions attached to that fund, recorded
as a balanced entry.

Between the two sits the question of whose money it is. An unidentified
deposit goes to suspense rather than raising somebody's budget.

If a payment arrives short

We record the exact amount received, the fees taken, and any exchange
difference, and we leave the shortfall visible as an outstanding
expectation. We do not overwrite what was expected with what arrived.

Unknown freezes the next one

If a payment cannot be told apart from a payment that never happened,
every further release on that award stops until somebody establishes
what happened to it.

That is inconvenient and it is deliberate. The commonest way to pay
somebody twice is to reissue something that already went.