2. AR SESSION: Best Practices for Month End Closing Carly Kelso and Ruth Sensabaugh
14 April 2015

3. Month End : Processing Checklist

4. Last Business Day booking status
Open new accounting period before noon
Restart Credit Card Processes
Own Local
Run 1st pass for Own Local charges before 10 am
Enable credit status for Own Local Errors – accounts that failed to load due to disabled
booking status
Run 2nd pass for Own Local to include the newly enabled accounts
Reset the disabled status for the accounts that were originally disabled in the 1st pass

5. Last Business Day
Run Invoice Auto Pay Tool - The Invoice Auto Pay Utility allows you to create payments for customers that have a credit card defined on their account with the option ‘Use for Balance Clear’ selected. The payments are automatically applied to the invoices that are selected for payment based on their due date. Run the Payment Report after the tool completes to verify the payments created and total amount
Log into Invoice Auto Pay Utility
If desired, run the Payment Report for declined payments to see which customers had payments attempted by the Invoice Auto Pay Tool but were declined

6. Last Business Day
Pre-Billing Report for the month - The Billing report is run for Non Invoiced items to ensure that all transactions for the month are invoiced
Login into the standard reports
Highlight the Billing Report and click Select
Run for publishable - The report should
reflect zero count and zero amount.
If there are ANY items reflected,
these need to be investigated
and deleted/invoiced as appropriate.

7. Last Business Day
Run Write-off Utility for small balance adjustments - Using the Write Off Utility, you can do small balance adjustments to zero out small balances remaining on customer accounts. Write-offs done for small debit balances are called discounts while write-offs done for small credit balances are called refunds. The application must be run multiple times for each company to first verify the correct transactions are being adjusted and second to perform the write-off, first in verify mode and then in Commit Transactions mode.
Run Write-off Utility for Bad Debt write off adjustments- The Write-off Utility is also used for doing an automated bad debt write-off of past due account balances. When writing off based on an aging period, the utility will only write off that aging period – it will not write off invoices in older aging periods if such transactions exist. Therefore, to write off everything an account owes once they have a balance in a specific aging period, you would need to run the utility for that one account and specify to write off by invoice age date.

8. Last Business Day Verify all cash batches are closed
In Cash Receipts, go to the Existing Batch screen
Ensure all batches with a Batch type of Payments and with a create date in the period you are completing all show Closed
Run Balance Utility - applies any unapplied credits and payments
Mark invoices for collection - This process marks outstanding transactions as in collections and assigns a collector and collections date to the transactions, allowing for these transactions to be sent to or tracked for collections. To mark transactions for collections you must set some selection criteria and options on the marker.

9. Last Business Day
Assess Finance Charges - To be considered for finance charges, the account must have the Exempt from Finance Charge option unselected. Any account with this field selected will be by-passed by the Finance Charger application. The application also checks the Minimum Finance Chg field on the account. If the finance charge calculated is less than the Minimum Finance Chg, the account is by-passed
Annual % Finance Charge – 18.0% (this charges 1.5% on a monthly basis)
Finance Charger creates debit adjustments that must be invoiced just the same as debit adjustments done throughout the month
Inform the Credit department to NOT change customers to/from Disabled status

10. Last Business Day
Ensure that all adjustments are approved if using Adjustment Tier Management- All credits must be approved no later than the 31st. Any adjustment approved on the 1st will automatically be recorded in the new month.

11. First Business Day Perform Period End Reconciliation Close Period
Period end reconciliation is the same process that is used on a daily/weekly basis to ensure the system is in-balance. Follow your Daily/Monthly Reconciliation instructions to balance the period/month being closed.
Once balancing is completed, you can print statements.
Close Period
Once the period has been balanced, the Period should be closed in Finance Manager.

12. First Business Day Run ISN Printer – Non-Agencies
Run ISN Printer – Agencies
Run ISN Printer – Disabled
Run ISN Printer – All
Run Coop Invoices
Functionality no longer supported by NCS

13. First Business Day
Link Statements to Customer Accounts - Once the full run of statements has been generated and printed, the PDF linker utility is run to link a copy of the statement to each customer. The PDF linker uses a slightly different version of the Crystal statement report file that does not have any parameters. This file must reside in the bin directory of the fat client that is used to run pdf linker.
Inform the Credit department they are clear to change customers to/from Disabled status
Customer Balance History Utility
The Customer Balance History utility will populate the tables for viewing the summarized financial history of customers in the Customer Transactions window. This can be run anytime following month-end close and can be run for individual customers as needed.

14. Questions and Comments

15. Carly Kelso Ruth Sensabaugh
Director of Advertising and Circulation Accounting
The Denver Post
(303)
Ruth Sensabaugh
Advertising Accounting Assistant Manager
The Denver Post
(303)