Today, we’re sharing the final installment in our accounting checklist series. The monthly checklist has more steps than the other two, but if you’re reviewing your data daily and weekly, it won’t take nearly as long to complete.
Before we walk you through the process, it’s important to note that if you’re a Multipub user, other employees can still be in the system while you’re making your checks. That being said, all work needs to be dated, so it will be posted in your next accounting period. Depending on how long it takes you to run your reports, there may be unposted work on the system for future dates for a few hours or up to a day or two. This is completely normal.
The first step in your monthly checklist is to make sure everything is posted. This includes:
- All data entry transactions for the current accounting period.
- All manually entered cancellations in the current accounting period.
- Issue labels with this month’s ship date.
- Shipping labels with this month’s ship date.
- Verifying monthly revenue recognition has been run for access days products (if applicable)
- Changing the “processing month end” to “yes.” Doing this means data entry, cancellations and sort invoices cannot be posted. It will also create default dates on the general ledger and aging reports and write values to the BALFILE for the month end balancing report.
Now that you’ve completed these steps, you’re ready to run the reports. Before you get started, it’s important to note that you should allow one report to run completely before beginning another. Do not attempt to run the reports concurrently on different screens, as this often means your reports won’t balance. Consider setting up a deferred execution job where the system will make sure the next report begins immediately after the last one. For the monthly checklist, you’ll run the following reports:
- General Ledger
- Deferred Revenue Report
- Accounts Receivable (A/R) Aging Report
- Month End Balancing Reports
- Any additional reports required for internal processing
Next, balance the reports.
- Balance the deferred. Look at the deferred balancing report. Is the last column all zeroes or only a few pennies? If so, it is balanced.
- Then, balance the accounts/receivable. Is the last column all zeroes or only a few pennies? If so, it is balanced.
So, what happens if your system is out of balance? There are a few steps you can take.
- Check the month end balancing report. Is the Reported Column all zeroes? If so, rerun the reports with zeroes. Or, is the current General Ledger column all zeroes? If so, rerun the General Ledger Distribution Report and the Month End Balancing Report.
- If the accounts receivable or deferred reports are out of balance, run the Accounts Receivable and Deferred Revenue Balancing Reports in detail for the products in question. Then, give our customer support team a call.
Once your month end is balanced, allow work to be posted in the new accounting period. You can do this by advancing the accounting period and turning processing month end off.