When you’re looking for an association management software (AMS) solution for your organization, you might not immediately think of how it will address your accounting needs. But just consider how often your membership activities and processes require accounting support.
Invoicing, cash receipts, and other financial transactions, including deferrals, credits, and inventory management – all play a role in your membership management activities. Your AMS should include accounting and sub-ledger functionality to support full integration of your financial data directly with the correct accounts in your accounting system.
NetForum Enterprise AMS by Community Brands includes an accounting module designed to handle the financial needs of mid-to-large organizations. With NetForum Enterprise, your staff can easily compile financial data to know exactly where your company stands at any given moment.
Here are twelve ways NetForum Enterprise helps you manage your association’s financials.
1.Create and adjust pro-forma invoices for companies and individuals, apply discounts or late charges, and process payments.
2.Post transactions to a third-party general ledger system by batch.
3.Process returns, and reverse posted transactions back to credit cards or third-party payment systems.
4.Charge credit cards electronically at your meetings or point-of-sale, and store tokenized credit card numbers (for security purposes) and partial credit card numbers for displaying and searching.
5.Set up various shipping options and freight charges.
6.Maintain tax tables, including Canadian GST taxes, and handle multi-currency transactions.
7.Integrate your financial data directly with the correct accounts in a third-party accounting package, and communicate seamlessly with other software such as MIP Fund Accounting, Solomon, Great Plains, or Epicor.
8.Track multiple business units and create the associated multi-company journal entries.
9.Track fiscal years and closing periods.
10.Search transactions by type, GL account, date created, billed, approved, printed, posted, and more.
11.Make reconciliation easier using visual aids, line item drill-down capabilities, and reconciliation research functionality.
- T-accounts capabilities in NetForum Enterprise offer a graphic representation of a general ledger account to show you invoice details. Accountants and bookkeepers can use these T-accounts as a visual aid to view credits and debits side-by-side.
- Invoice drill-down functionality makes reconciliation research easy. Just select a link from the invoice profile page to display line items, and easily view debits and credits.
- The Transaction Lifecycle Tool in NetForum Enterprise displays the invoice and invoice details. Clicking on the invoice detail displays the general ledger transaction history in a T-account, making reconciliation and research a breeze.
12.Track Deferred Revenue accounts and make revenue recognition easier.
- NetForum Enterprise allows product’s, such as memberships and subscriptions to be setup for deferred revenue and offers a simple way to recognize that revenue by accounting perio, based on your organization’s revenue recognition rules (monthly, quarterly, annually, etc.).
- Additionally, accounting professionals and business analysts can run revenue recognition reports for past and current accounting periods as well as future periods in order to look at projected revenue for forecasting.
NetForum Enterprise treats each deferred line item as a mini-ledger showing an expected recognition schedule and balancing recognitions and other transaction types against that schedule. - Because of this setup, it is easy to visually look at any deferral and see its status, and know how much revenue has been recognized, what accounts will be credited and debited, the type of line item involved (membership, discount, etc.), how much recognition is left, the expected recognition dates for each period, and actuals showing if the revenue was recognized, voided, cancelled, written off, or adjusted out.
- NetForum Enterprise provides a profile page with all this data for any deferred line item and there is no need to consolidate all deferred revenue into bulk accounts and push back to your accounting system for a more disconnected, and less accurate approach to processing deferral events.
In conclusion, NetForum’s advanced accounting capabilities are an important feature our customers routinely rave to us about. When considering a new association management software (AMS), it’s important to take the time to ask about accounting functionality. Accounting data is critical in understanding the success of your association from membership renewals to dues processing and profitability. To learn more about NetForum accounting, request a demo today!
