Financial Management Overview

Wild Apricot includes a special module - which corresponds to the Finance tab - for managing your Accounts Receivable. This module is used to track income - invoices issued by your organization, payments collected, and refunds.

Its capabilities include:

• Automatically generate invoices for transactions on your website
• Self-service for your members, event registrants, donors, or anyone else, to view and pay their invoices online
• Administrators to record other payments received (e.g. cheques) or charge client credit cards (assuming that card information has been provided outside of Wild Apricot)
• View the financial transactions via the list of Invoices or list of Payments/Refunds
• Generate instant financial reports: Income report, Payments Report, and Aging Receivables
• Export your financial transactions, including special QuickBooks format
• Look up original transactions (e.g. membership application or event registration) which generated a particular invoice

Admin View

The admin has access to all the invoices and payments for all contacts in the system:

Contact View

• Each contact/member can also log in and view their own invoices and payments from within their profile.
• The contact can pay online for any or all invoices with an open balance.

Invoices

Types of Invoices

Automatically Generated Invoices

• All transactions (e.g. membership application, event registration) automatically generate an invoice. Invoices itemize all details of the transaction (for example, a membership application with an extra cost field would have a line of the application cost and a line for each extra cost selection made).

Manually Created Invoices

• The admin can also create 'manual invoices' - which are not linked to any transactions in Wild Apricot but to something else processed outside of Wild Apricot, e.g. to charge sponsorship fees. When the contact / member logs in they will see these manual invoices (in addition to any other automatically generated invoices) and they can pay for some/all of them online. 

Invoice numbering

Invoices are numbered automatically based on your settings.

Invoice Balance

Each invoice has a balance, which is the total amount of the invoice minus all the payments settled to the invoice. As long as there is an open (outstanding) balance the admin can record full or partial payments. Once fully paid the invoice will then show a zero balance.

Customizing and viewing Invoices (admin only)

• The admin can view any existing invoice, print it out, or email it at any time. 
• Invoices are formatted according to a customizable invoice template.
• The invoices can also be edited or deleted - though you have to be careful as it might lead to discrepancies between your transactions and your financial records. These changes will automatically be reflected in the contact/member view as well.
• A special field called "Internal notes" can be used for any comments or special notes about a particular invoice - you can search these notes via the "Invoice list" screen.

See more: Invoices - Overview

Payments

Payments are records of moneys received.

See more: Payments - Overview

Types of Payments

Online payments - which are recorded automatically when someone processes a self-service transaction with online payment on your website.

Offline payments (a.k.a. manually recorded) - payments which have to be recorded in Wild Apricot by administrators, for example cheques received or credit card payments charged outside of Wild Apricot through your own merchant processing interface.

Classifying Payments

Payments can be classified by 'tender' - to record how it was received. For online payments, tender is recorded automatically, e.g. Online - Authorize.Net credit card payment. For manual payments, tender is selected when the payment is entered, e.g. 'Cash' or 'Checking Account'. You can customize the list of tenders as needed.

The admin can record payments on specific invoices (these are automatically settled to this invoice, reducing its balance) or enter the payment on account, meaning that a payment can be recorded for a contact without settling it with a specific invoice. If the contact on the other hand pays online, the payment is automatically settled with all the invoices the contact paid for.

Handling Special Cases

Tenders can also be used for special cases, e.g. you can create a tender 'Special discounts' and record payments with this tender type. In this way you can still include the original invoice in full into the income report, but then partially or fully discount it. These can be analyzed via "Payments report".

Recording Refunds

The admin can record refunds from the "Payments & refunds" screen under Finances tab (see Refunds). The refund will automatically be reflected on the contact profile.

Donations

Donations are a special case - you do not 'invoice' people for donations in the same way as you can invoice people for membership dues and event registrations. Therefore, there are no 'unpaid donation invoices' in Wild Apricot. Instead, donations are only recorded when the payment is received. Thus, donations do not affect contact balance. Also, on the contact account statement, donations are displayed in a separate column from invoices and payments and have a separate total.

Donations are accessible in two ways - they are included in the overall payments list screen under Finances as well as presented separately on a Donations screen under Donation tab.

Donation receipts are also numbered automatically - they have their own numbering setting, separate from invoices.

Donation receipts are formatted according to a template you can customize in the system.

See more: Donations database

Contact balance and account statement

System tracks a balance for each contact in your database - total of all invoices, payments and refunds for that contact. This balance is displayed on their contact card in the upper right hand corner. It can be zero, positive (money still owed) or negative (overpaid).

You can instantly produce an account statement report for any contact in your database (Admin view):

Settling invoices and payments

Invoices have a balance associated with them - how much of the original transaction fee they still owe to your organization.

Settling payments and invoices is a process of matching up specific payments and invoices.

If a person paid via credit card, system automatically records a payment and settles it with the related invoice so there is no outstanding balance from that invoice.

If manual payment was chosen, this will generate an invoice with an open balance. Later on, when the payment is received and recorded, it can be settled to this invoice. Manual payment can be full or partial.

Settlements can be canceled at any time (e.g. payment can be unsettled from one invoice and applied to another invoice on the same contact - or left unsettled). When a settlement is canceled, the payment record itself, invoice, and transaction all stay intact.

When a payment is settled in full, the system performs all changes to the contact/member that are specified by the workflow. For example, if your members are automatically activated when paid in full, then that action takes place. Manual actions, such as approving a membership application, will still have to be done by a member.

Pending / Incomplete transactions

• Pending transactions refer to transactions that have yet to be completed e.g. invoice is not yet paid or the member application is awaiting admin approval.
• If a member initiates a member application / renewal / level change but does not pay the invoice (or is not yet approved), that member stays in Pending New / Pending Renewal / Pending Level Change respectively. The member would only move into Active status (with full member benefits) once the invoice is paid or if the admin manually activates them.
• Similarly an event registration remains incomplete until the associated event invoice is paid for.

Audit log

The audit log (available to administrators only) is a special journal/log where the system records and keeps track of all important financial events - such as invoice creation, deletion, payment errors, etc. Usually it is not needed, but it is useful when reviewing a troublesome transaction to understand what has happened. See Audit log

Key reports

Exporting and Viewing Report Data

Many reports include visual charts and provide the ability to export in PDF, Excel, or Quickbooks formats.

Types of Reports

Income report - summary of invoices issued for a selected period, by transaction type.
Payments report - summary of payments received within a selected period, by tender type.
Donations report - summary of donations within a selected period
Aging receivables - a list of contacts with open balances by 30 day bands.

Income report
Payments report
Aging receivables report

Example

To help you get a feel for how the system works, let's take a look at non-member visitor, Mike, registering for an event that also includes member-only pricing.

During the event registration the system recognizes Mike's email as a non-member and automatically offers him the option to apply for membership first. At this point Mike cannot use the member-only price, which is shown as disabled:

After submitting the member application Mike has the option to pay for the membership right away, but he chooses to continue on with the previous event registration (he plans to pay for both invoices at the same time):

This time the member-only pricing option is enabled and available for use:

After Mike registers himself ($10) and a guest ($15) he then will have the option to pay for one or both of the invoices online:

Suppose Mike realizes he can only pay $25 with his credit card, so he decides to only pay the Event invoice online, and plans to send a check instead for the member application invoice. In this case the online payment is automatically recorded and settled with the event invoice.

Mike remains in "Pending New" state, and once the check is received the admin would then manually record the payment on the application invoice:

Mike can still come back at anytime and pay this outstanding invoice online if he so chooses. Note that this time Mike only has the option to pay for the application invoice: