SchoolLeader has the ability to work directly with outside General Ledger packages such as QuickBooks Pro to transfer payment receipt information into that General Ledger's "Bank" and "Income" Accounts. This process allows you to take advantage of SchoolLeader's rich Accounts Receivable features designed specifically for the preschool business, while at the same time use a very common/all purpose General Ledger package for doing generic tasks such as Balance Sheet analysis.
There are only two types of files that will need to be importing into your QuickBooks package to keep SchoolLeader and the General Ledger synchronized.
1) Deposit Files
2) Accounting Period Bookclose (True-up) Files
This chapter will discuss the Accounting Period Bookclose True-up Files. Refer to the previous chapter for a discussion on the Deposit Batch Files.
The Accounting Period True-up file contains any late modifications to prior Deposits which effected the revenue. For example, someone may have bounced a check and it was backed out of SchoolLeader as an NSF. Or, maybe a customer changed their mind and received a refund on their waiting list deposit. In either case, you have already uploaded the revenue associated with these events to QuickBooks with prior Deposit Batch Import Files. This True-up file will adjust down those balances to reflect these adjustments you have made in SchoolLeader.
These files should be loaded into QuickBooks after each Accounting Period Bookclose process. The file is automatically created for you and placed in the EXTRACTS directory on your servers hard drive.
This Accounting Period True-up File is created in one of two ways:
Automatically, when you perform a "Bookclose" to finish out the Accounting Period
In either case, a "True-up" Extract file will be created and stored in a directory underneath the main SchoolLeader directory on your server. This directory is called EXTRACTS. For example, if the SchoolLeader system has been installed in C:\ProgramFiles\SchooLeader on your server then you would access the newly created extract file by looking in C:\Program Files\SchoolLeader\Extracts
The file which is created will be named Receivables_Bookclose_YYYYPP (where YYYY is the affected Fiscal Year and PP is the affected Accounting Period). Shown below is an example of what you might see if you looked in the EXTRACTS directory after bookclose with the Microsoft Windows Explorer tool.
It is highly recommended that you DELETE the extract file from your hard disk after you upload it to avoid accidentally uploading it more than once. QuickBooks will not protect you from uploading a file twice. If you ever need to load a file after it was deleted you can always manually recreate the file using the main menu options. The window above shows multiple files in the EXTRACT directory and is for clarity purposes only.
Make sure you have setup all the necessary accounts in QuickBooks prior to performing the first import. If the Account does not exist, QuickBooks will create it for you. However, it always defaults to a "Bank" account. This is fine for your base Checking Account but is incorrect for your Income Accounts.