About Batching Scheduled Transactions

Most simple products have revenue recognized on the date when the product ships. However, some products have future revenue recognition dates. In these cases revenue may be recognized on a single future date, or on a series of dates over time.

• Products such as meetings or expositions have revenue that could potentially be recognized on a single future date. For example, an organization may organize a meeting that is scheduled for June, but customers may purchase tickets to attend starting in April. All the revenue that the organization receives from customers for that meeting is recognized on the date of the meeting.
• Products such as subscriptions or membership dues have revenue that is recognized over time. For example, a one-year subscription for a monthly publication is shipped to the customer 1/12 at a time, one issue per month, and a portion of the revenue is recognized when each issue is shipped.

Shipping orders for any product with future revenue recognition automatically creates Scheduled Transaction Groups in Aptify. See About Scheduled Transactions and GL Accounts for more information.

When the scheduled transaction group is expanded, entries are created based on product attributes. Products with one future revenue recognition date have a single entry created for the date when revenue will be recognized. Products with future revenue recognized over time have entries created for a series of future dates when revenue will be recognized.

This topic contains a simplified example of the use of Scheduled Transactions for a subscription product and how multiple Scheduled Transactions are aggregated in a batch.

A customer orders a 12-month subscription with a price of $24.

GL Entries for Subscription Order ID 200:

When the scheduled transaction group is expanded, scheduled transactions are created. For each month of the subscription time period, entries are created to recognize 1/12 of the revenue generated by the sale of the subscription product.

GL Entries for Scheduled Transaction ID 200:

After the first month's entry has been posted, the deferred income account has a $22 credit balance. This balance represents the obligation to fulfill the remaining subscription issues over the next 11 months. As each month passes, the Deferred Revenue account is debited another $2, until the course of the subscription is completely fulfilled.

When scheduled transactions are batched, the general ledger (GL) entry information is aggregated per GL account. In other words, if one A/R account has a credit entry for each of the payments in the batch, the batch contains a single line for that A/R account, listing the total of those order credits added together. Each GL account with an entry in the scheduled transactions has a single line in the batch GL information.

The example below shows one month of scheduled transactions aggregated into one batch. This batch contains 10 scheduled transactions similar to the one illustrated in Scheduled Transaction ID 200 shown above. All of the $2.00 debits and credits in the 10 individual transactions are aggregated per GL account.

GL Entries for Scheduled Transaction Batch ID 200:

Scheduled Transactions are batched into Scheduled Transaction Batches. When making a batch, the user creates a view of the scheduled transactions to batch. The view criterion usually defines a Scheduled Date no later than the last date being batched. Placing a limit on the start date of the batch is not recommended because this can cause transactions to be overlooked. The Batch wizard automatically excludes records from the batch that have already been included in other batches.

Finally, note that each generated Scheduled Transaction is associated with the Organization listed on the corresponding Orders record. This is required to determine the functional currency for the transaction.