Owl’s Tips for Year-End Part 2: Accounting Details for your Accountant

As we learned in Part 1, Account Summaries are a simple and fast way to get a client’s financial history together for them. Owl is designed to save you time, and having the ability to grab all of a client’s data in one place and pass that on to the client themself is incredibly helpful.

But what about your accountant? Once the year draws to a close, they’ll need all your financial data for all your work done, regardless of client. This includes your Revenues, Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, and so on. Before Owl, this may have been tedious work, with stacks of paper everywhere.

Well, Owl makes it easy! What you’ll need is a Data Export, and everyone has access to them!

Accounting Details for your Accountant

Summarizing your accounting data for the year is easy to do with Owl Data Exports.  There are typically three things you’ll want to prepare for your accountant for the time period you’re interested in:

1. a summary of your Practice Revenues
2. details on your Accounts Receivable (if you have any)
3. payments to reconcile to your banking statements

First, make sure you’ve updated the Attendance for any sessions you’ve conducted in the timeframe (so Owl knows whether the client showed up and should be billed).  Use the Workflow tab to do that if needed.Next, head to SETTINGS -> DATA EXPORTS to get started.

1. Practice Revenues

Your practice revenue is the sum of all the Amounts Charged for any sessions you conducted for the year.  These Amounts Charged are revenue, regardless of whether not you’d collected the amounts from your clients (hopefully you have!).  Any uncollected revenue becomes Accounts Receivable (see the next section below).

The easiest way to see your practice revenue for the year or month is in the Dashboard in our Year-At-A-Glance table at the top.

To see your revenue broken out by appointment, you can use the Session Export to export a file containing all your financial transactions for the year.  These are exported as a .csv file which you can easily open in Excel to summarize.  Here’s how you do that:

1. Click on the downloaded Session Export .csv file to open it in Excel.
2. Save it as an Excel Workbook
3. Use Excel’s summation formula to add up the total for the Amount Charged column (Column K)

This total is the Revenue for your practice for the year, and should agree with the total that is reported in your Dashboard.

2.  Accounts Receivables

Accounts Receivable are amounts that have been earned by your practice, but have not yet been collected.  Unlike Revenue, Receivables can change over time as you get paid.

The easiest way for you to see this amount is to look at the total in the top-right corner of the Workflow area in Owl at the end of the period in question (e.g. December 31).

If you forgot to make note of this number on December 31 (say you’re now in the middle of January), don’t worry!  There’s another way for you to get the Accounts Receivable for your Accountant.  Your increase in accounts receivable for a period is simply the difference between  your Revenue for that period minus any Payments you’ve received for that period.  These represent money that is owed to you for services rendered by your practice.

Here’s how calculate the Payments you’ve received for the period:

1. Download the Receipt Export for the time period in question.
2. Click on the downloaded Receipt Export .csv file to open it in Excel.
3. Save it as an Excel Workbook
4. Use Excel’s summation formula to add up the total for the Amount Paid column (column D), making sure to exclude Payment Amounts from any Receipts marked as “Void” (column G).

This total is the total of Amounts Received by the practice for the period.  The difference between your Revenue and this Payment total is the change in your Accounts Receivables for the period.

3. Reconciling your bank statements

Your accountant or bookkeeper will also want to reconcile the Payments you’ve received from clients, with the deposits made to your bank account.  To do that, it is best to use the Receipt Export.

In this export, you accountant can see a complete list of all payments made by clients, all associated data (date, receipt number, amount of payment), as well as the method of payment.  This information can be used to make sure that your records in Owl and your bank statements are in agreement with each other.

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These instructions and procedures apply to whether you want an annual, monthly, or even weekly summary for your business. The only difference is the time-frame you use when exporting your practice data.

If your accountant wants more detail, or would like to reconcile things at a transactional level, you can simply send the Session, Invoice, Receipt and Payment Exports to your accountant directly for the period.  They should be able to quickly summarize your practice accounting details easily and quickly, using the above steps as a guide.

That’s it! As the year draws to a close, Owl Practice wants to wish you and your practice the best. For many of you, this is your first time using us for accounting purposes, and we’re glad to have you here!

Remember, if you ever need any assistance with accounting (or anything else, for that matter), you can always contact us. We’re more than happy to help!

Practice Wisely