Here are a few tips and tricks to help you with keeping on top of your members and their fees in Uplifter.
BEWARE OF UNBALANCED INVOICES!
Always ensure that your invoice totals match your payment amounts. Ensuring you do this will always ensure that our revenues match your payments (or bank deposits) and that you are collecting the proper amount for each of your registrations. Be sure to pull an "Invoices - Unbalanced" report regularly to ensure you stay on top of this. Unbalanced invoices will make it impossible to reconcile details into any type of accounting software. Invoice totals and transaction totals will be highlighted in red if they do not balance as you are reviewing them.
ESTABLISH PERIOD END DATES
You will want to establish accounting periods that make sense with your club. You'll need to make this decision based on the different accounting needs you might have (a fiscal year-end, tax reporting or your club operations). Many clubs try to keep their periods sorted by their seasons of operation and at a particular point in a season, discontinue any updates to registration invoices because all of your revenues and payments may be recorded into your accounting package. Uplifter timestamps the moment any given line item of a registration invoice is created. Determining when to export your data based on this date may work best. You will need to make internal rules that invoices from a previous month or cutoff date cannot be updated in terms of changing revenues. You could also implement the invoice item locking feature to somewhat automate this process.
BEFORE EDITING AN INVOICE, CHECK IF IT HAS BEEN RECORDED IN YOUR ACCOUNTING SOFTWARE
You may want to set some rules as club administrators to ensure that registration invoices are not being edited outside your period end dates. If you have a team that is diligently updating information into your accounting software, once they have recorded it invoice, do not make changes to the invoice that affect the revenues of individual line items. Perhaps institute a month end rule or a periodic rule where any invoices more than x days old (30, 45 or maybe 60) should be updated using different methods. If updating a registration outside of this closed period, instead of removing a program or updating a program price from an invoice, withdraw the participant from the program, do not adjust the amounts and create a separate invoice to reflect the credit or even a separate line item with a custom refund line to reflect the change. If you are creating separate lines or invoices for credits and you are using Uplifter to auto-generate tax receipts, be sure to keep track so you can verify that amounts have been recorded properly when generating tax receipts for a tax year.