I agree it is a great explanation. Unfortunately we have never use the payment log to track Unit transactions. It was only ever used just for windows into the scout accounts.
A typical retention period for financial records is 7 years.
You should be able to run historical reports, so keeping old member accounts is crucial.
When members leave a unit, the committee needs to address any remaining funds or outstanding debts. Then, account for it. If that is done, there is no issue.
If the accounting isn’t done, and all it is used for is communication, then why the fuss about balances?
Personally I dislike the shortcut accounting used in the system to keep it simple. When money moves, my preference is to see the ledger where movement of money is seen on both sides,e.g. a member account and the unit account. But, the simple system does work when understood and used properly.
In the feature assistant extension, before unit accounts were introduced to native scoutbook, I had a feature that handled it for you. The extension also has a “close account” feature that makes it easy to manage members leaving. If you don’t have the extension, I don’t recommend installing it now though, because it doesn’t work with SB+ and it won’t be long before legacy SB is dead anyway.
That has always worked for my unit in the past. What needs to be understood is why it didn’t work for your’s.
