Troubleshooting Reconcilations In Financial Edge
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Q: What do accountants suffer from that ordinary people don’t?
A: Depreciation
Now that I have captured your attention with an unsolicited, accounting dad joke, let’s talk about troubleshooting reconciliation in Financial Edge. Last week, I had the pleasure of presenting a webinar titled, Empowering Your Financial Edge Capabilities. During this session I focused on highlighting under-utilized tools in your Financial Edge system and how with a little set-up, these tools will make the work you do to enter and report accurate data, quicker and more automated.
When reconciling, it helps to know exactly which types of transactions may cause an out of balance, and how to troubleshoot and/or locate those particular items.
These are the most common causes for discrepancies between the ledgers:
1). Voided or deleted transactions
2). Transactions where the transaction date and Post-date are in different fiscal periods
3). Journal entries made directly to the sub ledger summary account
4). Remitting Payroll taxes, deductions, or withholdings from the incorrect account
5). Adjustment dates and Adjustment post dates to the incorrect periods
6). Beginning balances that have been entered to the General Ledger
7). Finally, consider Payment date prior to the post date and vice versa
To help you find the root cause of those issues, there are a few queries you can run before ultimately running the General Ledger and Account Distribution reports:
If you would like additional resources from this session, please check out the latest post from my dear friend and colleague, Jeremy Vanscoy. Please stay tuned for additional sessions and opportunities brought to you by Blackbaud’s Customer Success team. Our goal is to help support your mission to do good in the world and we will continue to develop content and resources to ensure your organization’s success.
A: Depreciation
Now that I have captured your attention with an unsolicited, accounting dad joke, let’s talk about troubleshooting reconciliation in Financial Edge. Last week, I had the pleasure of presenting a webinar titled, Empowering Your Financial Edge Capabilities. During this session I focused on highlighting under-utilized tools in your Financial Edge system and how with a little set-up, these tools will make the work you do to enter and report accurate data, quicker and more automated.
When reconciling, it helps to know exactly which types of transactions may cause an out of balance, and how to troubleshoot and/or locate those particular items.
These are the most common causes for discrepancies between the ledgers:
1). Voided or deleted transactions
-
- Specifically, where the void date doesn’t equal the original post-date, so we have the original debit and the washing credit in different periods, or where the void transaction was marked as Do Not Post while the original transaction was posted.
2). Transactions where the transaction date and Post-date are in different fiscal periods
3). Journal entries made directly to the sub ledger summary account
-
- This means that General Ledger sees the transaction…but the subledger does not. We see this happening when you enter a transaction in the General Ledger and you PLAN to go into the subledger to create an equitable transaction marked as Do Not Post, but you get called away from your desk or simply forget.
4). Remitting Payroll taxes, deductions, or withholdings from the incorrect account
-
- If you feel you have an almost infinite combination of Deduction types, pay types and employees, chances are you’ve hit this snag before. While the best way to avoid it is through careful construction of the types in the first place, if on the Deduction you’re electing to combine the employee’s distribution with the Deduction account code then each new employee created must be carefully paid attention to on their first payroll processing. Although fixes can be easy enough – simply delete the offending payment and reprocess payroll filtered for the single employee – this becomes an issue towards the end of the year when pay types must cross the Calendar set up in Payroll > Configuration > Schedules.
5). Adjustment dates and Adjustment post dates to the incorrect periods
-
- Adjustment date will change the open invoice report, but will not update to the General Ledger until it is posted
6). Beginning balances that have been entered to the General Ledger
-
- When you first set up an account, you have a one-time chance to set its beginning balance. It can either be set to 0 or to a different value. Locking beginning balances is a one-time task and cannot be undone. If you entered a non 0 amount for an account that you also use in Accounts Payable or Receivable or Payroll, then your subledgers will already have started as out of balance.
7). Finally, consider Payment date prior to the post date and vice versa
To help you find the root cause of those issues, there are a few queries you can run before ultimately running the General Ledger and Account Distribution reports:
- In the subledger, create an appropriate Record query (i.e. Invoice or Payment query) to find transactions where the post-date differs from transaction date.
- In the General Ledger, create a Transaction query to search for manual journal entries/adjustments made to the summary accounts
- In the subledger, create an Invoice query to search for adjustments that have different Post and Adjustment dates
- In the subledger, create a new post parameter or query to view all Not Yet posted transactions
- Also, in the subledger, create a Payment query to search for voided payments that have a reversal Post-date in a later period than the original payment Post-date. Of note: Deleted invoices appear on the Open Invoice Report up until the deleted date. The invoice shows as open in General Ledger from the original Post-date until the deleted date.
- In the subledger, create a payment query to find payments that have a different Check date than Payment Post date.
If you would like additional resources from this session, please check out the latest post from my dear friend and colleague, Jeremy Vanscoy. Please stay tuned for additional sessions and opportunities brought to you by Blackbaud’s Customer Success team. Our goal is to help support your mission to do good in the world and we will continue to develop content and resources to ensure your organization’s success.
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ARCHIVED | Financial Edge® Tips and Tricks
06/07/2019 3:21pm EDT
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