Table of Contents

Close a Financial Period

Reporting

• MRR Reconciliation (Ordway to External System) 
• Accounts Receivable Reconciliation
• Reconciling Tax between Ordway (Sales Tax Report) and Avalara
• Cash Reconciliation
• Deferred Revenue Waterfall 

The following is a list of best practices for month-end reporting. The intent of this checklist is to identify variances that may prevent you from properly closing a financial period. Utilize the steps that are most relevant to your business. 

Close a Financial Period

Month-end Close Process

Note: When journal entry generation is set to automatically under Setup > Finance, skip Step 1.

1. Add a Journal Entry Run (JER) for the period/month for ALL transaction types with Journal Entry Date = Transaction Date.

2. Navigate to Finance > Financial Periods, review the Summary Balances, ensure Unposted transactions do not exist. Any unposted transactions, and their corresponding financial/accounting impact to Revenue, A/R, Cash, etc. are not recognized in Ordway when left unposted.

Note: When a user tries to close the Financial Period with unposted transactions, Ordway alerts the user and required additional action.

3. Review the Summary Entries. The detailed Journal Entries for the month are summarized by transaction type (ie: Invoices, Payments, Revenue Schedules)

4. Download JE Export as an index to support other reports. It can also serve as a backup of the records in the unlikely event of data loss.

5. Finally, once ready to close the period, click More > Close and confirm the warning message. Closing a financial period closes all previous months while opening a financial period opens all future months.

Reporting

MRR Reconciliation (Ordway to External System) 

Navigate to Reports > MRR Report.

Objective -  This reconciliation is aimed at validating the completeness and accuracy of Ordway as compared to the company’s CRM. By comparing MRR between systems, we validate that all Bookings made it to Ordway via the integration, import process, or manual workflows.

Read more about the MRR Report. 

Filter - Discounted MRR = true/false as appropriate depending on how your CRM is reporting this figure.

Important! MRR in Ordway displays when the last day in the month has an Active subscription with a Recurring charge type. One-time and Usage based charges in Ordway do not show as MRR.

Steps:

1. Download/Export the MRR report from Ordway as Excel or CSV.
2. Download/Export from your CRM (ie: Salesforce).
3. Compare by Customer, using a shared link/key (ie: sf_account_id on the Ordway Customer object).
4. If differences exist, check for common causes:

• • Was it a partial period in Ordway? 
  • Is the Subscription Active in Ordway or still in Draft
  • Check for Cancelled Subscriptions in Ordway, which if cancelled mid-month would show as $0.00 in the Ordway MRR Report.

Accounts Receivable Reconciliation

Objective

The purpose of this reconciliation is to compare the ending balance of Accounts Receivable (thereby the monthly JE activity of Invoices, Payments, Credits, and reversals of these transactions) to the Accounts Receivable Aging Report as of the last day of the month. 

Filter - Only use the date filter. 

Read more about the Account Balance Report. 

Read more about the Aging Report. 

Important! Invoice records have an associated table that is specifically used to calculate Invoice balance as of a point in time for the AR Aging Report. When troubleshooting a variance of the Aging to AR reconciliation, the audit log alone may not be enough to identify the root cause of the mismatch.

High-level Check:

1. Run Account Balance (Cumulative) Report for the month and note the balance of Accounts Receivable.
2. Run the Aging Report for the same month, using the last day of the month as the Target Date.
3. Compare the Accounts Receivable figure in #1 to the Total Outstanding figure in #2.

Steps:

1. Run the Account Balance (Cumulative) Report, and drill-down on the Accounts Receivable for the month.

2. Download the detailed report.

3. This output can be opened in Excel and will show all the transactions that had financial/accounting impact on A/R. It is important to filter the date range for ONLY the current month (assuming the prior month ending balance has already been reconciled, which validates the beginning balance of this month).

4. Compare this output to the AR Aging export.

Reconciling Tax between Ordway (Sales Tax Report) and Avalara

Credits are not being reported in Avalara, making reconciliation of the Standard Tax Report to Avalara and to the G/L Account Balance imperfect for periods/months where there was at least 1 Ordway Credit to the Tax G/L Account code.

Cash Reconciliation

Steps:

1. Export Ordway Payments (Navigate to Menu > Operations > Payments > Export Payments). 
2. Download Stripe Payments directly from your Stripe account.
3. Compare in bulk and if mismatch, use Payment Runs to determine which records are causing a variance.

Note: Be mindful of any refunds since the Stripe fee will actually be refunded. Reduce Stripe Fee G/L and Refunds by the Stripe fee related to any current month period refunds

Deferred Revenue Waterfall 

This report shows the balance of all Deferred Revenue Accounts as of the end of a selected month, and a forecast of expected changes based on the latest Billing Schedules and Revenue Schedules. Read more about the Deferred Revenue Waterfall Report.