Time Again for Year End Reports
For many Membee clients the end of the calendar year is also the end of their business year. We just wanted to remind all of you accounting gurus out there that it is wise to run a series of year end reports to give you a snapshot of the membership and financial activity for the …
For many Membee clients the end of the calendar year is also the end of their business year. We just wanted to remind all of you accounting gurus out there that it is wise to run a series of year end reports to give you a snapshot of the membership and financial activity for the year.
History
Along with the usual financial reports like Accounts Receivable, Cash Receipts, and Account Balance reports you might want to consider some of the other useful reports in Membee’s repertoire. 
- Often overlooked is the Parameters Report which can give you a very quick number of records for each status when you run it for the Organization Person Status. You can also get a list of GL accounts set up in Membee by running this report on GL Accounts.
- A Billing Information report can give you a summary of all of the information on the Billing Templates for your member records.
- A Dues Invoice List can give you a list of all the invoices
generated during the year. 
The Totals By Item Report is a quick way to get summary totals for various transactions like: Credit Memos, Invoices, Payments, Receivables, Write Offs or Transaction Activity- The Transaction Activity Report provides a list of financial transactions within a date range.
- If you have set the membership billing and event items to track the New Dollar / Retained Dollar values this is a good time of year to run the reports. You can use them to analyze where your revenue is coming from and answer questions like “Are new members attending and supporting my events?”
- Run the Participation / Non-Participation Report to see which of your members has been active over the last year or, perhaps more importantly, who hasn’t.
- Run the Check for Missed Invoices Report to check to make sure that invoices haven’t been missed.
As well as being a snapshot in time, a collection of the CSV versions of these reports over a five year period could be used in Excel to provide all sorts of trending data. You could analyze your membership join and drop dates or use the financial reports to generate an analysis of your membership dues revenue for example.
Consistency
This is also a great time to review your records and ensure the data consistency of your records. Reports that can be used to help you with this include:
- The Parameters Report can be used for data clean up too because it will give you a snapshot of the items in your list. Run it on Categories to make sure you don’t have duplicate categories in your records or on Cities to make sure that there is no duplication there. For example one of your staff may have entered St. John’s as St-Johns or Saint John’s. You probably only want the city name entered in a particular way. Seeing the list lets you easily identify those data inconsistencies.
- The Data Exceptions Report helps you to identify records where there is no category or no email address for example. You can find the holes in your data records so that you can make an effort to fill in the blanks as a project for the new year.
- A Listing Exceptions Report can help you evaluate listings in a directory to find missing important information like blank phone number fields or members with no listing at all.