Feeling out of balance? Here are the best reports to use to assist your reconciliation efforts in The Financial Edge
To ensure the reliability of the financial records for your organization, reconciliations are a must. A robust reconciliation process improves the accuracy of the financial reporting function and allows the Finance Department to publish financial reports with confidence.
The Financial Edge has the ability to assist with this process through the running of easy to use reports. The configuration of these reports have an intuitive design and can be updated on the fly. The parameters you define to run these reports can be saved and even scheduled to run and distributed to your users. This is not only a list of reports that you would use for your actual reconciliations, but also the reports that offer details of your financial activity to assist with your reconciliation needs.
Below you will see a list of the best reports to run from each module to assist with your reconciliation needs. Once you select any of these reports in The Financial Edge you can press F1 to get a definition of what this report will show along with tab by tab instructions on running the report.
General Ledger:
BalanceSheet – reflects your organization’s financial position at a specific moment in time. It reports on balances for all asset, liability, and net asset accounts as of aspecific date or as of the end of a selected fiscal period.
IncomeStatement – provides a summary of your organization’s financial activity over a timeperiod you select. It is a traditional accounting report providing information about all revenue, expense, gift, transfer, loss, and gain accounts over aspecified period of time.
General Ledger Report – provides transaction activity by account for a range of accounting periods you select. Depending on the level of information you need, you can run this report in summary or detail.
Trial Balance Report – lists each account balance and indicates whether the total amount of debits equals the total amount of credits. You can use this report to reconcile accounts at the end of each accounting period. You can run the Trial Balance Report in three formats: Balance, Period and year to date, and Year to date.
Accounts Payable:
Bank Reconciliation Report – presents the ending statement balance plus deposits intransit less outstanding disbursements. In addition, this report lists all transactions included in the reconciliation process and all adjustments (such as fees, interest earned, voided checks) recorded in the register at the date of reconciliation.
Aged Accounts Payable Report – provides a time line representation of the age of each invoice in your system. It provides a calculation of how much money you owe vendors, as well as a list of open invoices and credit memos associated with the selected vendors.
Open Invoice Report – lists all unpaid invoices and unapplied credit memos for a specified date range.
Accounts Receivable:
Aged Accounts Receivable Report – lists balances distributed into aging buckets that you define. This report is useful in determining past due and current balances of clients.
Open Item Report – lists charges that have not been completely paid and the amount remaining to be paid as of a selected date.
Cash Receipts Report – lists detailed cash receipts activity over a specified period of time, and is the report that shows individual receipts and payment detail.
Student Billing:
Aged Accounts Receivable Report – lists balances distributed into aging buckets that you define. This report is useful in determining past due and current balances of student and parent records.
Open Item Report – lists charges that have not been completely paid and the amount remaining to be paid as of a selected date.
Cash Receipts Report – lists detailed cash receipts activity over a specified period of time, and is the report that shows individual receipts and payment detail.
Advance Deposit Report – lists students, individuals, and organizations who have advance deposit schedules. The report shows detailed information, such as the total amount for the advance deposit, the amount generated, and the remaining amount to be scheduled. You can run the report to see information by payers or payees.
Payroll:
Payroll Register – list of paid and/or unpaid calculations, as well as a summary of amounts paid to your employees over time. This report is typically used to help payroll administrators verify payments and is often run after calculations are created for each payroll period. This report is also used to review the history of calculations and checks, as well as to summarize the earnings of employees for a specified duration.
Fixed Assets:
Asset Transaction Report – will list all depreciation transactions for selected assets.
Year-To-Date Depreciation – lists depreciable basis, prior years’ depreciation, and year-to-date depreciation expense for selected assets.
Cash Receipts:
Cash Receipts Report – lists detailed cash receipts activity over a specified period of time, and is the report that shows individual receipts and payment detail.
Outside of the individualized reports available there are a few standard reports that are present in every subsidiary module of The Financial Edge. The Account Distribution Report as well as the Project Distribution Report show debit and credit level activity that has been posted to the General Ledger at either the account or the project level. These reports are vital in identifying the details of the transactions that are getting posted in your system.
Now in addition to all these great reports, The Financial Edge also has reconciliation reports that take most of the guest work out of the set up to make the report generation even easier. These reconciliation reports are located in the Reports modules throughout The Financial Edge. This is sometimes the best place to start as it will guide you to the general area of a discrepancy and then you can use the more robust reports in The Financial Edge to gain the detail need to identify or correct any potential issues.
The production of these reports utilize a tab driven design screen to allow multiple parameters to be defined for each report to meet your specific needs. Specific transaction and record types can be set on each report as well as specific date ranges and post statuses. The same report can be saved multiple times with different parameters defined to make year over year comparisons and forecasting a snap.
Prior to starting any reconciliation in The Financial Edge there are a few areas you should review first. Unposted activity can easily throw off reporting totals, so make sure to check that all activity for the reconciliation period has been posted. Your Visual Chart Organizer is another area to check. You want to make sure that all your accounts are defined in the Visual Chart Organizer you are using to run your financial statements. If reconciling your cash account you will want to also run your bank reconciliation in Accounts Payable as well.
If you run into any issues or questions onbest practices when reconciling in The Financial Edge, another excellent resource for you to look to are the Blackbaud forums. Many Blackbaud clients utilize these forums to ask questions from their counterparts at other organizations. There are also policy and procedure guides available for download as well.
Remember it is import and keep your financial data as accurate as possible. By remembering to run and compare these reports throughout your fiscal year not only will it lead to more efficient reporting throughout your fiscal year, but also a more accurate End of Year audit.
For more information on managing the reconciliation process in The Financial Edge visit the Blackbaud knowledgebase at www.blackbaud.com/kb/
