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Concepts: JustOn and Bookkeeping

← Bookkeeping Overview

Businesses must do bookkeeping. It mirrors an organization's economic activities – providing a comprehensive and structured recording of all business transactions, expressed in figures. This information is made available to the management and investors, making it the foundation for purposefully controlling the company, and to authorities to comply with legal requirements.

JustOn Billing & Invoice Management continuously produces invoices for the products or services you sell and can, if set up accordingly, register and allocate corresponding payments. In that sense, the software also acts as a sales journal or debtors ledger that directly supports your bookkeeping processes. You determine the extend and detail you leverage, depending on your environment and business requirements:

Finally, you usually transfer your invoicing data to your accounting system, irrespective of the features you use.

Info

JustOn Billing & Invoice Management can act as a subsidiary ledger for invoicing data to support your bookkeeping. The relevant financial statements, like annual reports or income statements, are to be produced by your accounting system.

Detail Levels

With respect to the accounting support, JustOn Billing & Invoice Management distinguishes several virtual "complexity" levels.

accounting_levels
Bookkeeping support in JustOn Billing & Invoice Management

Basic

On a basic level, there are the invoices and invoice line items JustOn produces. These records show your sales volume, split into revenue and taxes. If configured accordingly, you can already add required booking account information. By default, the invoice line items hold the G/L account, determined by your rules. Optionally, they can also include the debtor number (populated from the custom Account field ON_DebtorNo) as the contra account.

For your accounting purposes, you can either create reports to just display the corresponding data, or export invoices to CSV files, which are to be fed into your accounting system for further processing.

Advanced

On a more advanced level, you can leverage specifically generated bookkeeping data – booking periods and booking details. They prepare the information obtained from invoices and invoice line items for accounting purposes: Booking details represent records in an accounting ledger, and booking periods represent one month in bookkeeping and aggregate the booking details produced for this month.

By default, JustOn Billing & Invoice Management creates one booking detail per invoice line item. It combines multiple invoice line items into one booking detail if specific data match (invoice ID, G/L account, tax rate). For details, see Bookkeeping Data Generation.

The key data involves:

Example: Generating default booking details

Consider the following example: One invoice with four invoice line items and the Default recognition rule results in four booking details, split by G/L account and revenue/tax.

Invoice line items

# G/L Account Pos Total Net Pos Total Tax Tax Rate Invoice No.
1 0001 10,00 0,70 7% R12345
2 0001 20,00 1,40 7% R12345
3 0002 30,00 5,70 19% R12345
4 0002 40,00 7,60 19% R12345

Resulting booking details

# Type Account No. Amount Tax Rate Name
1 Revenue 0001 30,00 7% 0001-R12345
2 Revenue 0002 70,00 19% 0002-R12345
3 Tax 2,10 7% 7.0-R12345
4 Tax 13,30 19% 19.0-R12345

booking_details.png
Booking details split by G/L account and revenue/tax with Default recognition rule

The produced booking details are intended either to be exported to CSV files or to be directly transferred to DATEV using the JustOn Connector for DATEV.

Best Practice: Generating Bookkeeping Data

Advanced with Revenue Recognition

When creating booking details for invoice data, you can choose to apply revenue recognition rules to control the way the involved data is transformed into booking details. This allows you to handle, if required, deferred revenue (which introduces the new booking detail type Deferred), shortfall amounts or margin amounts.

For an overview of usual use cases, see Bookkeeping Models.

Example: Booking deferred revenue

Consider the following example: There is an invoice whose amount is to be distributed equally to four booking periods using the Booking Month recognition rule.

Field Value
Pos Total Net 1000€
Tax 190€
Grand Total 1190€
Booking Date 2018-04-01
Service Period Start 2018-05-01
Service Period End 2018-08-31

Assume the following booking accounts:

  • G/L account: 1111
  • Business partner (debtor) account: 2222
  • Tax account: 5555
  • Deferred revenue account: 9999
  • (Virtual) deferred revenue contra account: 8888

Accordingly, JustOn generates the following booking details:

# Booking Period G/L Account BP Account Type Amount
1 2018-04 5555 2222 Tax 190
2 9999 8888 Deferred 750
3 2018-05 1111 2222 Revenue 250
4 2018-06 1111 2222 Revenue 250
5 9999 8888 Deferred -250
6 2018-07 1111 2222 Revenue 250
7 9999 8888 Deferred -250
8 2018-08 1111 2222 Revenue 250
9 9999 8888 Deferred -250

Notes:

  • The tax is always booked in the first booking period, based on the booking date.
  • 3/4 of the revenue is booked to the deferred revenue account in the first booking period, based on the booking date.
  • 1/4 of the revenue is booked in the first revenue-relevant booking period – based on the service period.
  • In every subsequent booking period, 1/4 of the revenue is booked and, at the same time, taken out from the deferred revenue account to offset the booked revenue.

Advanced with Payment Data

Your JustOn Billing & Invoice Management instance may be set up to capture payment transactions first-hand via JustOn Cash Management. In this case, your business may also require to prepare the payment information for accounting purposes. To this end, you can have the software write bookkeeping data for payment balances, again structured in booking periods and booking details.

JustOn Billing & Invoice Management creates one booking detail per payment balance change. That is, a change by a delta of 5,00 EUR results in a new booking detail with an amount of 5,00 EUR.

The key data involves:

  • booking date
  • account (debtor/creditor, taken from the debtor number on the account)
  • business partner account (bank account or payment provider as the contra account, taken from a corresponding Collective Accounts custom setting)
  • type (Payment, Prepayment, Refund, Payout, Write-off, Dunning Fee or Provider Fee)
  • amount (positive/negative)
Example: Generating booking detail for a payment balance with amount change

Assume the following actions:

  • Register partial payment on invoice
  • Generate bookkeeping data
  • Change amount of partial payment
  • Generate bookkeeping data

The first booking detail creation:

Field Example Value Description
Name 2019-01-15-Foo Inc. Concatenation of payment date and fallback to the account name (no debtor number available).
Amount -35 Taken from the Balance field Amount.
Payment Date 2019-01-15 The date of the payment transaction.
Booking Date 2019-01-15 The booking date may be different from the payment date if the target booking period is closed and the booking detail has been moved.
Payment Hash asd84578 Calculated by JustOn in order to track changes on involved balances.
Type Payment Taken from the Balance field Type.
Balance - Links to the associated balance.
Account No 1111 Set by collective account rules.
Business Partner Account No 2222 Set by collective account rules.

From the second bookkeeping data creation results a booking detail that covers the amount change:

Field Example Value Description
Name 2019-01-15-Foo Inc. Concatenation of payment date and fallback to the account name (no debtor number available).
Amount 5 Calculated as follows: new amount minus original amount (like -30 - (-35) = 5).
Payment Date 2019-01-15 The date of the payment transaction.
Booking Date 2019-02-01 Moved to the next booking period, since the original booking period has been closed.
Payment Hash asd84578 The same hash as for the original booking detail.
Type Payment Taken from the Balance field Type.
Balance - Links to the associated balance.
Account No 1111 Set by collective account rules.
Business Partner Account No 2222 Set by collective account rules.

The produced booking details are intended to be exported to CSV files.

Advanced with Unbilled Revenue

When billing subscriptions, the invoice creation may be "decoupled" from the subscription's service period. For accounting purposes, however, you may still require bookkeeping data for those items before they are actually invoiced. To support this scenario, JustOn Billing & Invoice Management can generate preliminary bookkeeping data based on active subscriptions – also referred to as unbilled revenue.

Once set up, JustOn Billing & Invoice Management "simulates" a monthly invoice run, creating the unbilled revenue bookkeeping data based on subscriptions and items for each past month if there are no corresponding invoices yet. This produces one booking detail per subscription item. Basically, it holds the same data as a booking detail produced from an invoice line item, except for the invoice-related data since there is no invoice produced yet.

When creating and finalizing the corresponding invoices, the existing subscription-based bookkeeping data is reverted. Consequently, the reverted bookkeeping data offsets the previous unbilled revenue.

Example: Booking unbilled revenue

Think of a subscription over a net 12000,00 with a service period of one year from 2022-01-01 to 2022-12-31. You invoice the subscription in December 2022. You want the unbilled net revenue recorded for the period from January to November – 1/12 for every month.

Once set up as necessary, JustOn creates two booking details every month (= booking period) from January through November: one Unbilled Revenue debit booking to be booked on the relevant receivables account, and one Revenue credit booking to be booked on the usual revenue account.

# Booking Period Type Amount Debit/Credit Flag Account Contra Account
1 2022-01 Revenue 1000,00 H (Credit) Revenues Debtor
2 2022-01 Unbilled Revenue -1000,00 S (Debit) Receivables Debtor
3 2022-02 Revenue 1000,00 H (Credit) Revenues Debtor
4 2022-02 Unbilled Revenue -1000,00 S (Debit) Receivables Debtor
...
21 2022-11 Revenue 1000,00 H (Credit) Revenues Debtor
22 2022-11 Unbilled Revenue -1000,00 S (Debit) Receivables Debtor

On invoice creation in December, JustOn reverts the previous unbilled revenue bookings: it creates one (large) Unbilled Revenue credit booking to offset the previous 11 Unbilled Revenue debit bookings, and another (large) Revenue debit booking to offset the previous 11 Revenue credit bookings.

# Booking Period Type Amount Debit/Credit Flag Account Contra Account
23 2022-12 Revenue -11000,00 S (Debit) Revenues Debtor
24 2022-12 Unbilled Revenue 10000,00 H (Credit) Receivables Debtor

Of course, JustOn also creates the relevant booking details for the finalized invoice. Assuming a tax rate of 19%, they will be like

# Booking Period Type Amount Debit/Credit Flag Account Contra Account
25 2022-12 Revenue 12000,00 H (Credit) Revenues Debtor
26 2022-12 Tax 2280,00 H (Credit) Taxes Debtor

The produced booking details are intended to be exported to CSV files.