Please apply any cash that needs to be applied to clear invoices from A/R before you begin the month end process. 

Purge Open Items

is the first step of the month end close.  It removes all completely paid invoices from the open items file. This is the first step in preparing to print statements. If your company runs invoices more than once per month, always purge before you print statements.

Calculate finance charges

Calculate Finance charges is optional, if your company is charging finance charges, run this step. If your company does not do finance charges skip this step. To setup finance charges go to each customer account  that you want to charge and check the finance charge checkbox:

 Please refer to the following screen for the details on starting a run of finance charges.

Enter the date range for invoices to be included in calculating the finance charges. Enter your interest rate, minimum charge and income account for finance charges.  If you want to include open credits in what the client owes, check consider recent credits box.  Click the calculate function to check what charges you are placing on the account.  The detail button shows you a list of the finance charges for the period.  Finally, once everything looks correct, click the load function to put the finance charges on your client’s accounts.  Remember no finance charges will be charged to customers without the finance charge box checked on the account. Remember to update your totals after calculating finance charges.

Load Retainers (optional)

 The load retainers function is used to load invoices for each customer that has a retainer setup on his account. This is primarily used for process service companies who have routes where they charge a monthly fee for routine filings.

 !!IMPORTANT!!

You must run “Print Sales Journal”, “Cash Journal for all Users” and “Print Monthly Activity”.  These are REQUIRED to successfully close out month end.

Print Sales Journal

All Sales must appear on a sales journal before you close the month. If you have already printed your journal after importing sales, you may need to run it again if you did any finance charges or monthly retainers. To be sure, it is a good idea to run this function anyway, just in case. It will let you know if there is nothing to print, which is OK. Once complete you can just go on to the next step.

Cash journal for all users

All cash must be included in a journal before you close the month. This function pulls all outstanding un-journaled items onto a report so you can close the month. Sometimes, especially if you have more than one person entering payments, you will miss their journal. This function takes care of that issue. You should always run this function and if no items need to be printed, this function will let you know. It is ok to proceed to the next step.

Print Monthly Activity

The monthly Activity report is run after finance charges are calculated. The entire month’s invoices are included in this report. This report is passed to the accountant or accounting staff for posting to the company’s general ledger.  it is a good business practice to save this report as PDF and put it into a folder for the month you are currently closing. Keep all system reports in that folder and save it to the side for reference. Our accounting software does not support dialing back dates to see a prior month's accounts. This is a critical month end report

Print Sales Tax Summary

The Sales tax summary is required for companies that do photocopy. You must setup your billing system to charge sales tax for this report to pull any data. You must also assign a sales tax code to your customer account to collect sales tax information:

Print Sales Tax produces a summary sales tax report for the month. Both the monthly activity report and sales tax report need to be printed during the month end process. Refer to the appendix for a sample report. The sales tax report should cross foot with the monthly activity report. There is no sales tax in the winserveplus system at this point. 

Month End Sales Summary

The month end sales summary is an optional report that shows you each invoice journal for the month.

Month End Cash Summary

The month end cash summary is an optional report that show you each cash journal for the month.

Statements

We have 3 statement methods in our software currently. They are each optional. 1. OLD style statements for customers that are over 5 years old. They tend to be custom and hard coded. We don’t setup this option for new customers.  Model statements is for newer customers and can be modified by Tristar Support staff without new hardcoding.  This option is also becoming a legacy function as we install new users, we setup the PDF statement system. Statement printing is the best part of this accounting package. You can simply tell the system to print statements and all the special statements for all your clients print without any special runs or extra steps.  As you set up your accounts, you defined what statements were required for each client.  This report uses your report definition and produces the special statements along with all the rest.  Refer to the appendix for sample statements.  If you need to just print a single statement for a client you can do that at any time by starting up the program and selecting the client number.

Print Commissions

 Print commissions reports are next in the month end close list. If your company pays commissions, print the WinCopySQL and WinServeSQL commissions reports. The commissions system based on invoices posted during the period.  Commissions are setup within the billing rate system and invoicing inside WinCopySQL and WinServeSQL.  If this does not match your commissions system talk to Tristar Software about your custom commissions needs. You will need to update your billing rate system to setup commissions before you invoice to capture the commissions for a driver (or you will need to hand enter all commissions).

Close out month end

Clear Monthly Activity and Sales tax files just clears the files for the previous month. This step is very important for the next month. If you forget to clear the files last months information will mix with next months information giving you a lot of extra work at the next month end.  The clearing process just empties the monthly activity file. You will not be able to run your sales tax and monthly activity reports for the last month after you click this item. Make sure you have all your month end reports before you click this item.

Clear Commissions

Clear Commissions empties the commissions report file. Make sure you print your commissions report before running this function. You need to clear the commissions files for both WinServeSQL and WinCopySQL at the end of each pay period.  Once again, commissions is tracked for a specific period and once closed cannot be reprinted.