Close a month

At the end of the month, a club owes three separate audiences a number: the state, for the CACFP reimbursement claim; its own funders, for whatever a grant's own conditions require; and BGCA, for the Monthly Statistical Report.

All three are built from the very same underlying records: the month's meal counts and the month's attendance. This page traces each of the three, because they each read those same records differently, and the three answers do not actually agree with each other.

The three returns at a glance

Return	Audience	Part of PTRS	Documented in
CACFP claim	Delaware and the USDA	CACFP	How a claim moves through its lifecycle
Funder report	Individual funders	Analytics	Build and send a funder report
BGCA statistical report	Boys & Girls Clubs of America	Analytics	Produce the statistical report
Financial summary	Internal, a cash-position view	Analytics	Read the financial summary

Before you start: what the month's own records actually contain

Two facts govern all four returns, and both are established elsewhere in this documentation.

Meal records are genuinely written, one per meal service, by record a meal count. Their own validity flag is set to false in every place that ever sets it and true in none. See CACFP overview.

The rolled-up attendance summary has no writer anywhere in PTRS at all. Check-ins write real attendance records; the separate summary table every report actually reads from is never filled in. See why analytics figures read zero.

So: meal records genuinely exist; attendance summaries do not. Everything below follows from that one fact.

1: the CACFP claim

PTRS models the claim's own lifecycle properly: seven stages, a status history, a twenty-rule check, a certification statement and a 60-day deadline. It is documented as the specification PTRS itself implements, at how a claim moves through its lifecycle.

No claim can actually be created through PTRS

The one save that would create a claim from nothing accepts only two specific program types, and the one button that reaches it, Create New Claim, always sends a third, unrecognised one instead. PTRS refuses it every single time with a message naming the invalid type.

So every stage below draft has no actual claim to act on. Read the lifecycle page as a specification of intent, not as a description of something that exists in your own installation of PTRS.

The deadline PTRS itself implements is still worth carrying over, because it is the one date month end actually runs against: the submission deadline is the last day of the claim month, plus 60 days.

From the regulation The built-in rule behind this cites the federal meal-program regulation for that 60-day limit; the arithmetic above is what PTRS itself works out from it. Check the regulation directly before relying on it.

Two further details decide what any of this checking is actually worth.

The table of validation rules has exactly one writer, and it only ever runs in a development copy of PTRS. Outside a development copy, that rule list is empty, so zero checks ever run, and PTRS reports every claim as submittable regardless. Inside a development copy, one particular rule fails on every single claim, because no meal record is ever marked valid, and that same rule is one that blocks submission outright. So on a development copy no claim can ever be submitted; on a real installation no claim can ever actually be blocked.

Of the twenty built-in rules, only four run a genuinely distinct check. Four always pass regardless of input, two simply count an empty table, two return a pass before actually doing anything, and eight duplicate one single rule's own check under a different name and a different citation. The full table is at what each rule actually tests.

And the money itself: the one reimbursement calculation that actually runs looks up the free rate and the ARAS program type for every meal record, whatever its own real tier or program actually is. See the reimbursement arithmetic.

Prepare the CACFP claim outside PTRS this month

Use PTRS's own meal counts as your source records; they are genuinely real, and taken at the point of service, which is exactly what a reviewer asks for. Do the actual claim arithmetic against the published USDA rate schedule for the program year, and keep your own worked calculation on file.

What a reviewer will actually ask you for, and which of it PTRS actually holds, is at what a CACFP review asks for.

2: the funder reports

The funder reports screen lists every funder as a card and generates a report in one click. This flow genuinely completes: a record is written, an audit entry is recorded, and a formatted document downloads. See build and send a funder report.

Its own headline impact figure is always zero, because it is built from the same attendance summary table nothing ever writes to. See the attendance figure. Read what the report actually says before sending one to a funder.

Creating or editing the funder the report is actually about is a separate rule from generating the report itself. See manage funders.

3: the BGCA Monthly Statistical Report

This report genuinely runs from start to finish and builds ten of its twelve sections from real, live figures. It is the most complete of the three returns. See produce the statistical report.

Six qualifications apply to its figures, all covered on that page, and none of them appears anywhere on the screen or in the exported file. Three of the six actually change what you may file.

Average daily attendance, the headline statistic of the whole return, divides by the count of months that were not zero, rather than by twelve.

Two whole sections are fixed at zero outright, and a fourth section is simply defined as the sum of two earlier ones, so that fourth section can never differ from what those two already say.

The exported document and the exported spreadsheet do not actually contain the same sections. The document leaves out the two fixed-zero sections; the spreadsheet includes both, as rows of zero. Neither one is a substitute for the other.

One section reads the month's own meal records directly, across all five meal types, and is genuinely reliable.

The year list is built from incidents, not from attendance

The years offered to choose from are the years your organisation recorded an incident in, plus the current year. A club with three years of real check-ins and a spotless incident record can only ever select the current year, even though the report itself reads from a completely different, genuinely populated table. PTRS itself will accept any year you ask for directly.

4: the financial summary, and the disagreement

Read the financial summary is described by PTRS's own internal note as a cash-position view, not a formal accounting figure, but a planning figure instead, and that caveat never actually reaches the screen itself.

Its own "CACFP Projected" column is the reason this whole page exists. It prices the very same meal records the CACFP module itself prices, and it ignores that validity flag entirely, works out a rate per tier from each site's own enrolment mix, and assumes every child is at the paid tier wherever a site has no active enrolments recorded at all.

Reading the same month's meal records	Produces
The CACFP module's own estimated reimbursement	Zero, permanently, because it requires that validity flag
Analytics's own CACFP Projected figure	A positive planning figure across every recorded meal
The statistical report's own meal section	Meal counts, by type, with no money attached at all

Neither screen mentions the other at all. The arithmetic behind the projected figure is at the CACFP projection.

Worked out This disagreement is not a rounding difference. One figure requires a flag that is never actually set, and the other figure never reads that flag at all, so the gap between them is the entire month's worth of meals.

Neither figure is an amount you could actually claim

Treat the projected CACFP figure as a planning estimate across every recorded meal, which is exactly what its own stated assumptions say. Treat the estimated reimbursement figure as genuinely absent rather than as an honest zero. The amount you can actually claim is the one you work out yourself against the published USDA rate schedule, with the working kept alongside it.

Month-end order

Close the meal counts first. Correct anything wrong the same month. See correct or remove a meal count.

Run the statistical report and read its six qualifications before any of its figures leave the building.

Generate the funder reports, and tell each funder plainly where the attendance figure actually comes from, rather than letting an unexplained zero stand on its own.

Prepare the CACFP claim outside PTRS entirely, from PTRS's own meal records, against the published rate schedule for the program year.

Write down what you actually filed, and what you based it on, in a note. See Write a note. This is the record that answers a reviewer three years from now.

Related

• CACFP overview, Analytics & Reports overview
• Meal and claim fields
• What each figure is computed from
• Run a service day, where the month's own records actually come from