Financials Overview
Welcome one and all!
On this page we are going to lift the bonnet of the financial system that underpins Majestri, shining the torch on some core design decisions that were made along the way, which will hopefully equip you with all the knowledge you need to be able to plug your debtors seamlessly into the rest of your club's larger accounting picture.
Let us put it out there straight away :- Majestri is not an accounting system. It certainly has some accounting concepts built into it, but we've worked on making Majestri a system that can be used by volunteer Treasurers who may not necessarily have an accounting background. Therefore, there's a bit of a trade-off sometimes with usability taking precedence over strict accounting practices. Our hope is that the range and power of our exports will make up for all that when you go to creating entries in your accounting system of choice.
So drag out the abacus and hold onto your pocket protectors, we're about to begin....
Invoices
An invoice created within Majestri will have at least one component, and at most two; a Registration component and/or an Order component.
topRegistration components get created on an invoice when somebody registers for an event in the system that has a non-zero amount fee package attached. More info on fee packages can be found here.
Order components get created on an invoice when somebody makes a purchase from the online shop with a cart total greater than $0.00.
Either of these components may be the only component on an invoice, but when the online shop is presented to your members as part of the registration process, an invoice will frequently have one component of each type.
At the time of creation, the outstanding amount on the invoice will be the total of the components on the invoice.
Payment Allocations
Payments are allocated across one or more outstanding invoices that are held by a member.
If the Manual Receipting function is used to process a payment, then one of two possibilities will occur:
1. The payment being receipted matches the total outstanding amount of money owed and the outstanding invoices will be automatically finalised.
2. The amount being paid may be less than the total amount, in which case the person receipting the payment will be asked to allocate the payment amount across the outstanding invoice components. You read that right. It is possible to allocate partial payments across registration or order components.
The control of allocation gives you so much flexibility if your shop is run by different people to those processing registrations. They only really care about how much money is owed for the invoice component that they are responsible for (ie. registration or order).
Adjustments
To learn more about how to create adjustments on registrations or orders, click here.
For the three types of adjustments described, let's have a look at what happens behind the scenes in the financials:
Debit Adjustment
When a debit adjustment is created, the system creates a brand new invoice. It is an invoice independent of that originally created for the registration or order, but it will forever live with that invoice component. It will be treated like any other debt and can be serviced by payment in the same way.
Refund Adjustment
A refund adjustment will create an invoice, but it is different to a debit invoice in the fact that the signs on the amounts are reversed. Money is being owed to the member, rather than them owing you money. It will remain in an outstanding state until the money has been physically refunded and processed in the system.
Credit Notes
A credit note is a special type of payment and is treated that way by the system. No money actually changes hands but it is allocated to a debt in the same manner as a payment. It literally just lessens the amount of somebody's debt.
Reporting
So, now that we know how these financial documents get created behind the scenes, what type of reporting are we able to extract out of Majestri in order to help you keep immaculate records in your main accounting system?
Most clubs are pretty keen to report on the income that comes in. Using our Bank Reconciliation functionality, you can specify a date range, choose a method of payment and see all the money that has come into the system, and the debts where that money was allocated.
For some that need more granular reporting, you will want to drop that data into a (CSV) Comma-Separated Values file and open it up in your spreadsheeting solution of choice (ie. Excel, Google Spreadsheets) and rearrange the data to suit transferral to your accounting system. It's possible there may be some massaging that needs to be done here; we try hard, but we can't make it perfect for everyone.