Finance - Key Principles

• Before dealing with any Finance in Schoolworks, it’s important to have a good understanding of the key concepts and behaviours of the system.

• The majority of finance is processed through Enrolments.

  • The Enrolment screen has a number of finance features to help minimise the amount of work needed by the Finance Team, such as automatic generation of credit transactions when cancelling for example.

• However, Finance Teams typically work at the Account level as this gives an overview of ALL transactions on the Account.

  • For example if a manual invoice is raised on an Account, this will not be shown in the Enrolment Finance.

  • If a Student has multiple Enrolments, it is possible to view all outstanding amounts from all Enrolments at the Account level.

  • Receipts, Payments and Manual Invoices/Credit Notes are all processed at the Account level.

Key Principles and Terminology

• The Truth - an obvious principle perhaps, but as far as possible, Schoolworks should always “tell the truth” of the transactions that have taken place. Where shortcuts may be possible, for the integrity of the data and to avoid any follow-on issues, it’s important to follow processes thoroughly. The better the quality of the data in the system, the easier it will be to work with, and the better reporting and decision-making will be.

• Audit Trail - once finance has been Posted (Invoiced), the system ensures there is an audit trail of any further transactions related to that Account. or Enrolment Any changes such as curtailments, extensions or cancellations will have a subsequent transaction so it is possible for auditors to review the full “finance journey” if necessary.

• Balances - in order to maintain reliable Account Balances and Reports, any Receipts or Payments should be processed promptly and allocated accordingly.

• Transactions vs Documents - documents are simply a representation of the data that is in the system. Finance documents should never be edited to suit a use case - any changes should happen within the Enrolment or Account, then a new document generated.

• Please review the following pages for further details on terminology and core behaviours:

  • Finance Terminology

  • Posted vs Unposted Income

  • Invoice Methods

  • Tranasction Types

  • Sales vs Income

• Key Finance objects in the database are:

  • Finance Journal - the lowest level object, a Finance Journal is created for each Booking (and related commission or discount).

  • Finance Reference - the grouping of Finance Journals in a transaction, for example an Invoice is a Finance Reference record containing child Finance Journal records.

  • Finance Ledger - all transactions are posted to a ledger to ensure a zero balance is maintained

  • Finance Statistics - this object is used to “spread” the income across periods, to give weekly, monthly, quarterly or yearly income figures, useful in reporting for Deferred Income

• The following graph gives a summary overview of the relationship between the objects in Schoolworks: