Creating G/L Entries

Theatre Manager is designed to automatically facilitate a number of the processes involved with creating and tracking postings to the General Ledger. To review these postings, the G/L Entries window can be used. For more information on the G/L Entries window, click here.

How Theatre Manager Works with the G/L

There are three types of General Ledger entries created by Theatre Manager:

• Deposit entries that summarize payments by the method of payment such as cash, check, credit card, other and custom payment types.
• Sales entries that summarize the revenue received for ticket sales (and refunds, exchanges), donations and passes, gift certificates and memberships.
• Manual entries that record periodic transactions, such as the payment of tax liabilities, corrections to reallocate revenue, year end activities and any adjustments needed to balance the A/R.

Timing for Creating Deposit and Sales Entries

Deposits and sales entries can be created at any time. The organization can create them any number of times per day. In order to balance the A/R in Theatre Manager, the two entries should be created for the same time period and at the same time.

The End of Day Wizard takes the user through this process and identifies any transactions that are out of balance. For more information on the End of Day wizard, click here. It can also be done manually using the various menu items under the accounting menu.

To simplify revenue analysis, the sales entry should be created immediately after the deposit entry.

Normally:

• The deposit and sales entry should be created daily.
• Only one sales entry is created for the same time period as the deposit.

However, a sales entry is automatically created for each revenue date since the last sales entry was created. Should the user decide not to create sales entries for a week, running the process will create a Sales Posting for each day that sales occurred in that week period.

Recommended Daily Practice

The End of Day wizard should be run at the end of each business day (or first thing the next morning) to create deposit and sales entries. To segregate daily business, the entries should be created prior to entering new sales and payments (corrections excepted). Creating the journal entries prior to entering new sales and recording payments, prevents combining deposits and sales for two periods in the same general ledger entry.

All ticketing and payment corrections and errors should be completed prior to creating a deposit or a sales entry.

To simplify analysis of the sales and deposit entries, create the minimum number of sales and deposit entries as necessary in any given day. If more than one is created, the user must remember to combine everything for that day in your search criteria before analyzing them.

Time Stamps on Transactions

Reviewing transactions for any time period is made possible by the date and time stamps that are placed on each transaction when it is created.

Time stamps are attached to transactions -- ticket sales, refunds, exchanges, and payments -- and are created at the time the transaction was entered into Theatre Manager. Time stamps identify the date and time that the transaction occurred and enable reports to summarize transactions for specific time periods.

Transactions created to "correct errors" are dated for the time they occurred. Orders, payments, refunds, or exchanges created today to correct yesterday's errors are date and time stamped today. Any amounts included in the transaction are included in the deposit and sales entries created today. Any transactions required to correct yesterdays transactions should be journalized in a sales and deposit entry prior to new sales being created. These transactions should be included in yesterdays "Deposit and Sales Analysis".