Deferring non-pledge membership revenue

While this is certainly “correct” from a GAAP point of view, it sounds to me like this is the full employment act for accountants! Do you have any idea how much money this represents? We certainly have some early renewals here at Strathmore, but I would estimate that we are talking about less than $1,000, which is clearly an immaterial amount.

I wonder if you could look at this by checking the renewals that come in during the last month or two of your fiscal year, which is the time most likely to see this situation. If you could show that during that period the number of early renewals is small, you might convince your accounting folks that this exercise would be form over substance.

Also, our membership structure is such that funds received more than 3 months before the expiration date are counted as upgrades to current membership, not as renewals, so that practice too would limit the amounts that would be deferred.

There may be some clever query that could be developed to identify members who have both current and pending memberships at the end of your fiscal year; by definition, all the funds for the pending memberships would be the deferral amount.

____________________________

Julie P. Hamre

Staff Accountant

5301 Tuckerman Lane

North Bethesda, MD  20852-3385

www.strathmore.org

301-581-5136

jhamre@strathmore.org

In office Monday-Thursday

From: Tessitura Development Forum [mailto:forums-development@tessituranetwork.com] On Behalf Of Beth Varro
Sent: Wednesday, September 21, 2016 5:50 PM
To: Julie Hamre
Subject: [Tessitura Development Forum] Deferring non-pledge membership revenue

Hi everyone,

We have a question from our Accounting department about potentially needing to defer the revenue from memberships that are purchased this fiscal year, but would "normally" have been purchased next fiscal. This would come down to deferring the revenue if the person already has a membership that expires next fiscal year.

Has anyway come up with a way to do this for non-pledge memberships? I've just been asked to look into options. We need something that will do this automatically, and for gifts sold in both the contributions and the ticketing channels. Our volume is too high for us to manually change the ticketing gifts on the back end.

Thanks in advance for any thoughts!

Beth

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While this is certainly “correct” from a GAAP point of view, it sounds to me like this is the full employment act for accountants! Do you have any idea how much money this represents? We certainly have some early renewals here at Strathmore, but I would estimate that we are talking about less than $1,000, which is clearly an immaterial amount.

I wonder if you could look at this by checking the renewals that come in during the last month or two of your fiscal year, which is the time most likely to see this situation. If you could show that during that period the number of early renewals is small, you might convince your accounting folks that this exercise would be form over substance.

Also, our membership structure is such that funds received more than 3 months before the expiration date are counted as upgrades to current membership, not as renewals, so that practice too would limit the amounts that would be deferred.

There may be some clever query that could be developed to identify members who have both current and pending memberships at the end of your fiscal year; by definition, all the funds for the pending memberships would be the deferral amount.

____________________________

Julie P. Hamre

Staff Accountant

5301 Tuckerman Lane

North Bethesda, MD  20852-3385

www.strathmore.org

301-581-5136

jhamre@strathmore.org

In office Monday-Thursday

From: Tessitura Development Forum [mailto:forums-development@tessituranetwork.com] On Behalf Of Beth Varro
Sent: Wednesday, September 21, 2016 5:50 PM
To: Julie Hamre
Subject: [Tessitura Development Forum] Deferring non-pledge membership revenue

Hi everyone,

We have a question from our Accounting department about potentially needing to defer the revenue from memberships that are purchased this fiscal year, but would "normally" have been purchased next fiscal. This would come down to deferring the revenue if the person already has a membership that expires next fiscal year.

Has anyway come up with a way to do this for non-pledge memberships? I've just been asked to look into options. We need something that will do this automatically, and for gifts sold in both the contributions and the ticketing channels. Our volume is too high for us to manually change the ticketing gifts on the back end.

Thanks in advance for any thoughts!

Beth

This message was sent automatically to you by www.tessituranetwork.com because you subscribed to the Tessitura Development Forum. You may reply to this message to post to the Development forum or visit the site to search, read and post to the forums. In the interest of keeping the forum posts from becoming cluttered, we encourage you to delete previous message text from your reply before sending. Thank you!