We're still a bit new to Tessitura and we have an entirely new finance department. I'll be posting a few other finance related questions but here's the first! I've seen the use of a refund GL and Pay Method for all refunds discussed here.
We confuse finance when we have, $500 in checks and a $200 "refund" that was actual correction to an incorrect payment method, thus debiting the $200 from the checking account (we use one GL for checks and cash pay methods).
I bring the posting to finance and while they physically have $500 in checks, the GL says they only have $300 so you can imagine the frustration. In this case, nothing ever matches.
I've set up a Refund GL and Pay Method so associates would not refund to the same pay method but actually to the specific refund GL so that would stop pulling funds from the cash GL.
However, how does this then affect actual ticket sales when we have a refund of actual tickets? I need to be sure that deferred revenue is being removed from that performance and whatever pay method previously used. If I use the refund pay method that won't happen.
Is this best practice? Also, is there documentation or webinars that delve further into the finance side of Tessitura? We inherited an odd GL setup, do not reconcile daily tickets or fees, everything is posted to the financial software from the GL in one lump sum batch and I'm seeing it's problematic but need to be able to direct our finance folks to more information.
Thank you!
I think you're on the right track -- we use one GL and payment method for things like cash and CC sales and refunds, but for checks, I'd definitely want one GL and paymethod for income, and another GL and paymethod for checks being cut to refund a customer. That way when I bring income to finance, the income GLs are consistent with the cash in hand. (The only situation where this wouldn't make sense is if we submitted a posting where cash refunds > cash income -- let's hope that never happens!) When you return a ticket in an order and refund to that paymethod, Tessitura will correctly move the money from the performance to the refund GL.
As you may have noticed, Tessitura doesn't track every single cent to tell you where it's going and where it's coming from (since there can be ambiguous cases in orders with multiple payments) -- instead it relies on balancing each transaction against one or more GLs. So you can always rely on your posting reports/GL Summary report balancing out to $0, since every GL credit has an associated GL debit. The only way to mess this up, really, would be to have errors on the income side or on the GL assignment side.