Nightly cash balancing - best practice

Accela CASH balancing

Total all CASH by type:

• Cash – amount exceeding seed amount.
  
• Checks – confirm receipts show the correct payer and payment amount as compared to the checks themselves.
  
• Credit – confirm you have signed Accela credit card slips (or receipts from your standalone credit card processing machine) for each transaction posted in Accela.
  
  

Run the following reports for “CASH" balancing:

• Payments Received (by Cashier, Method, Module, or Office – whichever is most applicable to your agency setup) – only includes CASH payment methods of Cash, Check, Credit Card – this is the primary report for balancing.  Recommendation typically is to run it by method – for Start and End date, best practice on this parameter is to run it nightly to do cursory balancing even if you do not deposit daily, otherwise you can enter a date range. If you do not have separate physical offices, set Office to ALL. For Module, you can do a multi-select by selecting the first module, hold down CTRL and select the other module, holding down CTRL until you are done making all selections needed. Separate Online refers to separating the online credit card payments from those processed over the counter – recommendation is this is always set to YES. Payment Method selection is recommended as ALL unless you are needing to focus on only one payment method. Cashier is also recommended as ALL unless you need to run it for one particular cashier, however in this case use the Payment Method by Cashier report option.
  
• Unapplied Transactions – use this only to audit nightly to assure staff are applying payments appropriately as per business rules – or that fees did not become 'unapplied' due to fee adjustments on records as these should always be reapplied immediately at the time of adjustment – if this is the case, corrections should be made in the same day if possible.
  

For Converge credit card balancing:

• Open your Converge batch directly thru the US Bank Converge website – check that the Batch Total for the day matches your Credit Card Total (Online and Over the Counter/OTC) in your Payments Received report.  If you do not process your OTC credit card transactions using Converge, the Converge batch will then only show your online transactions as shown in the Online Credit Card section of the Payments Received report.  If you use a separate credit card processor to process your OTC credit transactions, you would then check the total for that separate service to the Credit Card section of the Payments Received report.

Accela GL/Account Code reconciliation

Run the following reports:

• Transactions Applied by Account (or by Account and Payment Method to show transaction data with payment method detail) – includes ALL fee transactions (credits/debits)  for the dates it's run for – summary by account code on first page and details on remaining pages.  If you are using the nightly batch file process, this report will closely mirror what you receive in your batch file.
  
• Funds Transfer report – to gain added detail on any fund transfers made from record to record.
• Revenue Exceptions report – to show the following exceptional 'payment' types – Credit Memo (discount at the individual record level, by exception case by case), Journal Entry (payments made outside of Accela, direct to Finance), Payment Restore (restore of payment voided in error from prior transaction date), Internal Transfer (internal payments from one agency department to another), Write Off (bad debt), Fee Waiver (discount based on policy, ie. never charge Habitat for Humanity, etc), and Billed (designed for Purchase Order processing). This report should result in manual journal entries to your financial system accordingly, as these are not currently included in the nightly financial batch files.