Hello Finance friends!
I hope everyone is handling this better than our organization, so you can direct me to some best practices... The crux of our issue is Tessitura views payment methods as text fields, thus seeing no difference between a debit from Amex to credit to On-Account, but our bank deposits don't see the "refund" that is then reflected on our posting reports. Essentially, our Finance Department is trying to reconcile our bank deposits with the posting reports, but moving payments from real payment methods (i.e. Amex, Visa, MC, Discover) to internal payment methods (On-Account, Gift Cert) is confusing our totals with what is actually credited or debited to our Vantiv accounts.
What way(s) are you reporting a real refund (Amex to patron's CC) vs. a movement of money (Amex to On-Account)? We just a need a one-to-one representation as to what monies landed in the bank.
To give you a bit of background in our environment, we have one on-account payment method that is used by both Devo and Ticketing. Our round-up donations land in on-account money and are then manually booked by our IG team. In the past, Ticketing has used on-account for "returned" subscriber tickets in which they can use those funds and apply it to another purchase in the future. Our current problem has apparently always been an issue with Finance, but I am just now being looped in. Unfortunately, when Broadway shut down on March 12th, we got 'Seat Release Utility' happy and moved all perfs from 3/13 - 4/12 to on-account (all prior to the Event Cancellation Utility release).
I am not against building a separate on-account payment method to use for COVID-related purposes, but that still doesn't solve our reporting issues - all payment methods will still show up on the posting report with a debit from Amex and a credit to on-account.
Any/all suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
THANK YOU!!
I'm currently working on writing some new reports for our finance procedures, and on account/gift certificate has been the big thorn the whole process as well. I haven't completed it yet, but I can share the logic of what I intend to do. We are a part of a university that uses SAP to handle all our Cost Center/GL Accounts. So we have to pull all payments by GL out of Tessitura in order to get them applied to the correct account in SAP. In SAP we have a specified Cost Center/GL Account for Gift Certificates which is where all that money lives until it is eventually redeemed for a product and transferred to the relevant GL. Normally this is done at the end of the fiscal year, but our new procedure might have us do it on a monthly basis.
The main problem is, is that Tessitura views on account and GC as a payment while our internal business practices look at them as a product. So the report logic is sort of opposite of what Tessitura says. My plan is to look at all transactions involving one of these payment methods. If the transaction is a zero adjustment transaction or payment for payment (Credit Card charge applied to Gift Certificate), I will actually treat it like a product sale. I state $X.XX in revenue was received from a credit card to be applied to our Gift Certificate GL. Then if an on account or GC is redeemed for a product, or a product is refunded to on account/GC, I treat these transactions like a ticket change transaction. So the report would then create 2 unique payments, the payment method would be "Transfers" and then it would show revenue in or out of the Ticket GL, and the opposite revenue in or out of the GC/On Account GL. Those get lumped together with all the other ticket change, fee change, and fund change transactions, and we would do one lump transfer between all different funds for the month.
I understand your finance system outside of Tessitura might be a lot different. But if anything I mentioned makes any sense, and you want more details, let me know.
I'm not exactly sure what our setup within Tess is compared to what you are describing, but we are able to have Gift Certificate purchases (the product) go to a liability G/L account as is required by GAAP. Then when the Gift Certificate is used to pay for a ticket, the "payment method" moves it out of the liability account into our Deferred Revenue G/L account (also when revenue should be recognized per GAAP). If your SAP system is counting the Gift Certificate as revenue, it is recognizing it incorrectly.
I'm not an expert on the finance/SAP side of everything, but I do know that the money in that specific SAP Gift Certificate account cannot be touched unless triggered by a transaction from a customer. So yes, it is technically revenue in a cost center account in our system, but it's not considered "our" revenue until its redeemed. I think all of that is controlled by our university since every university entity uses this same finance system, and a lot of other departments use gift certificates.