The Book Bag : Advance deposits

Student Billing Reconciliation Redux

Charles Soderlund — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 16:43:00 GMT

Greetings faithful blog readers!

We recently held a customer round table regarding the fabulous topic of reconciling Student Billing to General Ledger. This was the first of many sessions we hope to hold discussing popular topics in Student Billing. Our support team is working hard to develop these sessions for all products, and to that end, I thought it would be a great idea to gather some feedback on what we developed for the Student Billing session I conducted. Below are links to our FAQ page with the Powerpoint slideshow and the recorded discussion with video screen capture directly from our live session. Check these out!

Student Billing FAQ and Reconciliation Roundtable

I will be adding more reconciliation tips and tricks to future blogs. Tell me what you think about what we have now for Student Billing and keep your ear to the ground on our forums to sign up for future sessions, they have been filling up quickly!

Cheers!

Charles

Processing Re-enrollment Deposits and Early Tuition Payments

Katie Infinger — Wed, 27 May 2009 19:39:00 GMT

This is a guest post by Chuck Hays. Chuck is a Senior Educational Consultant for Blackbaud.

Did you know we have an even easier way to correctly accrue payments for the next school year? First, let's touch on the accounting requirements. If you take money now that will be applied to next year's charges, you must accrue the money received rather than recognize the funds as revenue. Then, after adding next year's charges, you relieve (debit) the accrual and credit the student record.

In Student Billing, you accomplish everything you need using two records. First, you create the payment, and then, you apply the payment to an advance deposit charge. The payment uses the credit distribution on the advance deposit charge (an accrual liability account) rather than crediting the normal receivables summary account. Later, you generate the advance deposit credits, which reverse the accrual and also credit the student account.

In The Financial Edge 7.78, we made it easier to create the advance deposit charge while creating the payment by adding a new grid option at the bottom of the payment record. The appropriate student(s) will be listed in the grid and you can specify which advance deposits need to be created. The new grid is especially helpful when using payers who are responsible for multiple students!

For those of you using an outside service to handle electronic transfers of such payments, like 10-payment plans that start in the spring, you can also follow a simple process. You will use two additional setup requirements. First, create a query to find the students using such a payment plan, either because of a bill code or an attribute. Secondly, create an application restriction set that is limited to advance deposit items.

Then, create one advance deposit charge on one of the 10-payment plan student records. After saving the item, but before closing, use the Transaction menu option to "Add this Advance Deposit to a group of records" using the query. Then, use the option in Administration to "Import from tuition management service," which also allows you to specify the application restriction set. When you import the payments, they will only apply against the existing advance deposit charge. Very useful if other charges are still on the account.

Tips from a Troubleshooter: Advance Deposits

Sean Long — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 19:29:00 GMT

Hi everyone! I know some of you might be familiar with me already; I'm Sean, a Customer Support Analyst who handles our Education Solutions products (Registrar's Office, Student Billing, Admissions Office, NetClassroom, and Faculty Access for the Web). I talk to a lot of you regularly, and I wanted to write a quick post about one of the most common subjects I talk about on a daily basis, especially this time of year

Advance Deposits.

Advance Deposits are a type of Billing Item used to record money received at one time but realized in a different time. For instance, a student pays $100 to hold a seat in your school next year. What do you do? You have to accept that money, but how do you track it in the system without it crediting your Accounts Receivable general ledger account? You may not want to record the money as actual revenue just yet, so you'll have to hold it until next year, because the new fiscal isn't starting until 07/01/09.

Although I've talked to customers who handle this in other ways, an elegant solution to that problem is the Advance Deposit!

Let's dissect the Advance Deposit. Like any Veterinarian will tell you, a creature is the sum of its parts. Our Advance Deposit is the sum of its tabs. The Advance Deposit has tabs that describe the amount, the generation date, and the GL Distribution (maybe eventually I'll post about those other tabs, like Notes).

Open up Configuration, and click Products and Billing Items. Now open up an Advance Deposit billing item. The Generate On date (at the bottom right of the tab) and GL Distribution tab are the only things I'll discuss here, as those are special when you talk about Advance Deposits.

The Generate On date is the date you need the money realized on your books (Crediting the Accounts Receivable account) and available to pay down a student's charges (their balance). For example, if the money is supposed to pay part of the first tuition payment of the year, and your school year starts on 07/01/09, you would set the Generate On date to 07/01/09.

The GL Distribution tells the system the account to credit when the advance deposit has a payment applied to it. This would generally be a Liability account of some sort, like a Deferred Revenue account. The money would debit out of this account and credit your Account Receivable account on the Generate On date.

Make sense? Here's how you use it in practice:

I send you a $100 check. You add this in as a Payment, and in 7.77, you select the Advance Deposit you want to create at the bottom of the screen. You will also enter the amount, and select whose account you want to credit during your Generate On date. When you then save and close out of that payment, two things are created on the student's Activity tab: An Advance Deposit line, and a Payment line.

These two lines will be $100, and the student's balance will show that there was no net gain or loss. That's because the Advance Deposit acts as a charge, so that it eats up (sorry to keep the Veterinarian reference going!) the payment and holds it in Liability until your Generate On date.

When you Generate the Transactions Automatically, you will then see a third line on that activity tab: A Credit of $100. This is going to be what you use to pay my tuition, or whatever other fees I sent you my $100 for.

Cool, right? I hope that clears up some questions about Advance Deposits! Do you use them a different way or use Advance Deposits to do something really creative? Let me know by commenting below!

'Tis the season for advance deposits and simpler data entry

Anthony Tomaino — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 19:26:00 GMT

We are making advance deposit data entry simpler. Yes, I said it. In our next release, version 7.78 which is due out this quarter, we have made some relatively simple, but very effective changes that will ease confusion around this cyclical process.

In my 3 years of experience with Student Billing 7, I have seen clients experience difficulty in the area of advance deposits. The first problem is that it is fairly little known that you can create advance deposits as placeholder transactions. This allows you the ability to send the unfulfilled advance deposit to show parents on their statements. It's always good practice to communicate to parents their upcoming fiscal responsibility to prevent lagged payments as best as you can.

It actually works quite well as it stands today. You can add all the advance deposits using the “Add Transactions to a Group” functionality. Then when you get the payment, you can just add it as a regular payment then apply it to that advance deposit. Nice right? Well what if you don't bill for them and just want to enter the advance deposit payments? Do I have to enter them in two separate steps? The answer is no and we helped make that easier too.

In 7.78, there will be a new and improved advance deposit records page as previewed below. It will guide you to determine how your organization handles this process and teach you about the generating credits process along with our Application Restriction functionality.

Oh, by the way, it also gives you a simplified data entry grid when you’re in the payment. If you click the Record an advance deposit payment button, it will pull up a new payment screen with the following improvements:

1. The Create advance deposits for this payment checkbox will automatically be marked meaning there is no longer a Create advance deposit button that you have to click.

2. It will default in all records that the payer is responsible for and split up the amount on the top evenly in the grid (don’t worry you can edit the amounts).

3. If you only have 1 advance deposit billing item, it will default that in as well. So you only have to save and close. If you have multiple, you just have to choose the one you want.

a. If you add from the records, payments screen, the only thing you have to do is mark the Create Advance Deposits for this payment checkbox and it will do all three of the above steps.

4. If you ever void the payment, we will tell you that it will leave an unfulfilled advance deposit on the student record so you know to go back and delete the advance deposit if the student is not coming back to school or to mark that student down as still needing an advance deposit payment.

Remember, it’s good practice to try it with one family first to make sure the schedule for credits is what you want, it’s on the right records and you are happy with those results. The schedule should always pull from next year, if not it means the payment date you entered is pulling from last year’s schedule. You just need to update the billing item to include the payment dates!

There’s lots of information in here, so feel free to post back. It’s always better to be prepared. Take care!

Student Billing State-of-Mind: Control Generated Credit Applications

Jennifer Maroney — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 11:13:00 GMT

How would you like to ensure credits generated from Financial Aid schedules can only apply to tuition or specific charges? Beginning in version 7.75, you can set application restrictions to control the application of advance deposit credits and financial aid credits.

Follow these steps to restrict applications when generating financial aid credits or advance deposit credits:

In Configuration, click Products and Billing Items.
Open the Financial Aid or Advance Deposit item.
Select the Restrictions tab.
In the Use the restrictions from field, select Specific settings below and define the appropriate filters or Configuration and select the appropriate application restriction.
Click Save and Close.

Talk to you soon!