Event Management Accounting, Finance & Attendee Payment Processing Systems

Nowhere is the difference between standard commerce and event management commerce more significant than in the area of finance and event management accounting. Your company may have to deal with the complexities of scheduled attendee payment processing using credit cards and checks, and the money that is paid for your courses most likely doesn't become revenue until the day the course is complete. Because payment for tuition is often made far in advance of the event taking place, your ability to account for such things as taxes, referral or sales commissions, and even attendance transfers is anything but simple. Fortunately, most of these complex issues are fully resolved in Signup Systems providing you better business intelligence for decision-making and reduced administrative costs.

For instance, we track the fulfillment status of everything you sell so that only when you actually deliver goods or services do we recognize the money paid for that as revenue and we simultaneously break out the tax. Reports can be run and exported as spreadsheets which include detailed itemizations of each transaction so that your bookkeeping can be performed in as little or as much detail as you need. Finally, we even account for revenue reversals when goods or services are refunded or returned by the customer after previously being recognized as revenue.

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Real-Time Payment Gateway Processing - Systems to Increase Sales & Systems to Decrease Costs

Use your existing e-commerce Merchant Accounts and Payment Gateway with Signup Systems real-time processing systems to collect money from your customers using a public shopping cart, or using an administrative order handling interface. If you don't yet have e-commerce merchant accounts, we can connect you with a merchant account provider who deals extensively with speaking and training companies (you may already have discovered that our industry tends to have difficulty getting accounts with typical merchant account providers).

• take credit card payments from your public shopping cart
• run credit card payments in real-time when data entering orders taken at your live events
• all payments and even declines are recorded to assist your administrators in auditing your sales and handling accounts receivable issues
• record previously taken payments in a non-capture mode so that you can migrate your existing business into Signup Systems
• credit card number verification logic reduces administrative errors and increases successful processing efforts

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Scheduled Credit Card Payment Automation - Systems to Increase Sales & Systems to Decrease Costs

In order to close more sales you may need to allow your customers to establish payment plans. Fortunately, Signup Systems was designed to easily handle this otherwise complex task. Create an unlimited number of scheduled payments in the system associated with one or more different credit cards and all your payments will be processed automatically while you sleep on the scheduled date.

• schedule unlimited payments with an easy to use interface that allows you to spread payments out evenly or spread them out in any way your customer may prefer and even allows you to use a different credit card for each payment if necessary
• payments are run by your Signup Systems installation starting in the early hours of each new day automatically so that by the time your administrators arrive every morning all your payments will be processed
• pull reports at any time to find all credit card payments run in any given period of time whether they were scheduled payments or executed in real-time
• failed payments result in order forms appearing on your accounts receivable pages so you can immediately begin contacting customers to recover missing payments
• all scheduled payments are displayed on order form pages for easy customer support
• scheduled credit card payment reporting pages summarize amounts to be charged and also breaks down payments into individual payments so they can be preprocessed with a button click if necessary
• extremely robust system capable of processing tens of thousands of credit card payments automatically every day

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Scheduled Check Handling System - Systems to Increase Sales & Systems to Decrease Costs

While taking scheduled credit card payments is fairly common for event management companies, many either choose not to accept scheduled check payment plans or do allow them and spend an unreasonable amount of time handling and accounting for these checks. Signup Systems provides a very elegant solution for handling scheduled checks which makes it possible and even easy to manage this payment method allowing your company to accept scheduled checks if you don't presently, and significantly reducing the administrative costs of handling check payments if you do.

• record unlimited scheduled check payments in the system to completely reflect the checks you have whether spread out evenly or sporadically
• record check details such as the name on the check, the check number and any relevant notes
• easily put checks "on hold" upon customer request so they are processed on a different date than their actual check date
• support to properly track cancelled orders with scheduled checks exists so checks can be voided, destroyed or returned to customer as appropriate and full accountability is maintained
• all scheduled payments are displayed on order form pages for easy customer support
• check payments applied toward order forms automatically on scheduled date and then reported so that appropriate checks can be deposited
• by recording our unique scheduled check ID number on the back of your post dated checks, you can file them sequentially and our system will tell you which check IDs to retrieve as needed for deposit on the appropriate date, completely relieving of you of the need for complicated storage and retrieval systems based on the calendar dates or customer name

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Multiple Currency & Tax Management Solutions - Systems to Decrease Costs

If your business is international in scope now or plans to be in the future, Signup Systems will allow you to grow your business into new countries so that as you expand you can continue to use a single installation and single database to bring all your international business together administratively.

• Canadian and U.S. currencies built in to system by default, but you can easily add any other world currency to account for your sales
• create federal or local (state/provincial or even county/municipal) taxes as needed
• allow a tax to be applied on your public shopping carts or restrict the tax to only being applied administratively
• system logic automatically tracks revenue and tax and exports reports in spreadsheet format so you can account for taxes payable with any bookkeeping solution you use

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Accounts Receivable (A/R) Management System - Systems to Decrease Costs

Collecting payments on courses you've already delivered, or ensuring attendees of upcoming events have paid in full before attending can be an extremely complicated and frustrating process. Fortunately, Signup Systems provides tools to not only bring the accounts receivable issue to your attention, but also to track your communications efforts with the customer to the point at which you either successfully collect payment or are forced by uncooperative customers to declare the account "Uncollectible". Our A/R system turns this essential business task into a highly efficient solution, which will ultimately save you money and help you capture more revenue.

• use separate A/R system reports for physical products, membership and courses to ensure the most appropriate communications and methods are used to when collecting money owed
• our system allows you to alternatively send emails and make phone calls to customers who have outstanding payments until after a preset number of collection attempts you can designate the order as "Uncollectible"
• full integration with our customer communications tracking solution so that a full history of your efforts to collect can be permanently recorded
• create emails to reflect the escalating urgency of each progressive communication attempt, which can then be sent automatically from the A/R system
• use special email merge tags so that the customer can be made aware of the issue's details such as the amount owing, the order form associated with the issue, and the reference number they should note when contacting your company to make payment
• each A/R issue has a different administrative "owner" so that when multiple staff are performing collection actions, they can avoid cross-talk that might otherwise confuse or anger your customers

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End-to-End Revenue Accounting - Systems to Decrease Costs

Because your company most likely doesn't generate "revenue" at the same moment that you complete a sale, Signup Systems has designed automated solutions for tracking money collected by the system as payments from the point at which the money is received and held on deposit as "deferred revenue," to the point at which it becomes "earned revenue" when your attendees complete your courses. Anything can happen between the time the customer places the order and actually attends. If you don't separate your deferred revenue from your earned revenue your company can be operating in the red without knowing it or paying tax on refunded sales.

• payments made into the system are automatically accounted for using "On Deposit" accounts which can be compared at any time to your bookkeeping records
• revenue "recognition" performed automatically as you "graduate" attendees after your live events
• taxes collected for sales are also broken out when revenue is earned so that tax only needs to be paid at the time it's due and not before
• full reporting for all possible streams of revenue recognition is available for your bookkeeping needs
• automated revenue reversals performed when items are returned or graduated attendees are refunded including reversal of taxes paid out so that when bookkeeping, these reversals can be recovered
• full transaction level accounting performed and available so that a forensic audit of your accounts can be performed by your organization

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Payment & Revenue Reports - Systems to Decrease Costs

Payments and revenues are handled as two separate but related systems to most accurately reflect the realities of most event management businesses which often take payments well in advance of the courses being sold. To ensure your business has all the essential information needed for business intelligence and accounting purposes, we supply reports for both payments and revenue recognition.

• payment and revenue reports can be pulled for any given period of time and exported in a spreadsheet format for analysis and accounting purposes
• revenue reports can be exported for all revenue related transactions during any given period of time
• generate reports separately for revenue earned from physical products and fees, membership fees, or tuition from completed courses

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Payment Reconciliation Tools - Systems to Decrease Costs

Whether you accept cash, check or credit card payments, you'll want to be able to fully reconcile these payments against your actual bank accounts to ensure that administrative errors are kept to a minimum and to eliminate the possibility of fraudulent payments being created in an effort to pay for tuition without using actual money. Using the payment reconciliation tools you can ensure that all the "money" tracked in your database actually represents real money you've received.

• internal "merchant account" system allows each individual possible payment type to be uniquely reconciled by you, for instance, U.S. cash is one payment type (merchant account) that is different from a Canadian Visa payment type
• an auto-reconcile tool exists which allows you to import a spreadsheet from your payment gateway to instantly reconcile all your payments processed through that gateway saving your accounting staff endless hours of reconciling payments individually
• create reconciliation records for groups of payments all at once and later merge those reconciliation records together

Event Management Accounting, Finance & Attendee Payment Processing Systems Summary

Signup Systems has very sophisticated event management accounting tools which will significantly reduce the amount of time you'll need to manage your business both before and after your events. Event finance issues are handled by our system as your attendees complete your courses automatically tracking revenue and breaking out taxes. With our sophisticated payment handling tools your attendees' payments are easily recorded and can be scheduled for future processing using both the scheduled check and credit card payment processing systems. Finally, you can reconcile your payments against actual bank statements and pull reports at any time detailing payments received and revenue recognized to ensure the highest level of integrity in event management accounting.