Spending Accounts Overview

Spending accounts are a powerful tool in QReserve to track and manage how users spend money in your facility. Automatically control monthly spending limits, pre-authorized financial caps, or limited access quotas while providing your users with full transparency and control. Over-spending from an account can trigger additional approval processes to keep people informed.

Types of Accounts

QReserve currently supports financial spending accounts much like a bank account or credit card. Accounts can optionally support start and end dates and can even automatically renew on a recurring basis to implement replenishing spending limits.

Open Accounts

An open account works much like a bank account that is provided with a starting balance and can then have transactions (debits and credits) occur at any time.

Time-Limited Accounts

A time limited account typically has a start date and an end date. Transactions can only be between these two dates and is a great way to define membership time periods, school semesters, or project timelines. Reservations that normally require an account to debit are not possible when no valid account is available for the time period in which that reservation falls.

Recurring Time-Limited Accounts

A recurring time limited account works the same way as standard time limited accounts except that new accounts will automatically be created and replenished on a recurring fashion. For example, a monthly recurring account of $500 would create an account that begins on the first day of each month and ends on the last and starts with a fresh $500 in spending each month. Note: Recurring accounts do not carry balances forward.

Transactions

A transaction takes place when a user spends money out of a valid account by making a reservation on a resource that has account debits enabled and selecting a non-zero rate. For more flexibility, you have the option to choose whether or not a resource is a debiting resource. This can be useful when you using accounts to control and track access to specific pieces of equipment but want to allow unlimited or unmonitored spending on other resources.

Over-Budget Approval Processes

You have the option to setup per-user approvers who are only engaged when the user is requesting to spend over their current account budget. For example, if a student is given a budget of $500 in a core facility they could be given free reign to spend that budget without any additional approvals. The first time they attempt to spend over that budget, their supervisor can be required to approve that reservation to provide your facility with a record of approved over spending.