Establishing the Current A/R Accounting Period

Since SchoolLeader accounting is accounting period based, it is important to know which A/R accounting period you are in, before you start any A/R functions.

There are two ways to determine your current A/R accounting period:

click on Accounting, Fiscal Calendar Maintenance, select your fiscal year, select Receivables, and click on FETCH CURRENT CALENDAR. Your fiscal calendar is displayed. Use the scroll bar to scroll up or down to locate the current period. It will be highlighted in green, and the status will say OPEN.
from the student folder, select an active student, then click on their Payment Account Tab. To ensure that the current accounting period is being displayed, click on the 'circle' in the accounting period control buttons. The circle ALWAYS brings you to the current accounting period.

When you start up FrontDesk Manager, SchoolLeader will assume you want data displayed for the current accounting period. However, if you or someone else has been scrolling through accounting periods, you may no longer be looking at data from the current accounting period.

Remember to be conscious of which accounting period is your current period. The dates corresponding to the accounting period are always displayed alongside the accounting period in any payment account window. Posting to the wrong period can cause problems if you don't notice is right away..

Establishing Your Current A/R Accounting Period

During initial setup of FrontDesk Manager, you would have defined the fiscal calendars. However, SchoolLeader will always initialize the current accounting period to be the first period of the first year. This has been done for two somewhat obvious reasons:

SchoolLeader doesn't know when you will begin using the accounting functions and where you will begin using it relative to the year. In other words, it could be June when you first use SchoolLeader and the first period is in January.
Some customers choose to go back in time to reflect charges and payments made earlier in the year, even though the 'real' calendar says it's July. For these customers, they will enter:
- all of their prior January A/R activity into the correct period
- close that period using the bookclose process
- enter the next period's A/R activity
- close that period using the bookclose process, and so on.

As a result of all this, the first thing you need to do after setting up you calendar, is to establish your current A/R accounting period. If you want to go back to the beginning of your fiscal year to enter data, then leave your accounting period set to 1. If you want your fiscal calendar to match the true current period before making any postings, then you will need to ADVANCE your fiscal calendar to the current period.

Advancing the A/R Fiscal Calendar

To advance your fiscal calendar, first determine the accounting period you want to be in:

click on Accounting
click on Fiscal Calendar Maintenance
type in your fiscal year
select Receivables
click on FETCH CURRENT CALENDAR. Your fiscal calendar is displayed. Use the scroll bar to scroll up or down to locate the current period. It will be highlighted in green, and the status will say OPEN. View the calendar and determine which period represents the 'real' calendar period. For example, Period 30 may represent 7/14/02 - 7/20/02. Remember the period number.
click on ADVANCE CURRENT PERIOD
use the up and down arrows to display the period you want to advance to
click on ADVANCE; you will be prompted with a warning message. Click on YES if you want to advance to the displayed period, or NO if you want to cancel.

Your current A/R accounting period has now been established, and you can begin using the SchoolLeader A/R functions.