It would be very helpful for our financial reporting if this feature was enabled

Hi Brian-This would be a great feature if correctly configured and utilized within YM. Normally, a product will go into Deferred status during a certain time frame. Similar to the early bird pricing option, it would be nice to set date range in which the revenue item would be classified to a deferred revenue GL and then if you could implement a second set of GL Code fields, we could list the actual revenue GL which the item would revert to after the date range has passed. We actually pull out the data and pull into a custom "batch report" system we have built. It would be nice to have both the deferred GL and the actual revenue GL appear in the transaction data for example 5010-000(3160-000). That would be my clue to defer a revenue item and where it will need recognized when the deferral period has ended. I hope this information helps somewhat.

Brian,

Sorry I have been traveling the last few weeks. Not sure if you have given up on this, but I promised to arrange a call with our accountant. Still happy to do that, but it would need to be next week.

Where does the idea stand at this point?

Tim

We are interested in such a feature, however it would be helpful to hear more from YM about what is possible. Each client will have a different fiscal year and different revenue to defer so it better be pretty customizable to be relevant.

Identifying deferred membership revenue is difficult, because the paid through date is overridden when a payment is applied. Therefore it is nearly impossible to easily identify payments by fiscal year, instead they look like duplicate payments and need manual review.

Brie, what are you referring to about the "paid through date" being overridden?  Are you referring to the "Membership Expiration Date"?  This date is only automatically updated once the invoice is set to Closed. Adding payments, such as installment payments, will not alter the Membership Expiration Date.

The initial thought process regarding Deferred revenue was to essentially divide the payment(s) among the duration of the membership. We would expose these payments via Custom Reporting so you could run a  report for the month to get a list of payments to claim as revenue. This 'report', however, needed data that was not currently stored in YM such as a second GL Code and a way to total per GL Code of what should have already been recognized and how much to still defer.

I have been trying different avenues to gauge the priority of this feature but to no avail. While this feature would be nice I am not getting the sense of urgency for YM to update the commerce features to include breaking down the payment and adding code to the reporting engine that would allow multiple totals.

I'm sorry to be late to the party. I do think deferred revenue is an important feature to have on the dashboard. We use YM and Quickbooks together, but we wind up using Excel to track deferred revenue and then journal membership income from deferred revenue each month. An integrated tool would save us a fair amount of accounting work.

Having the ability to establish deferred revenue in YM would be very beneficial for a non-profit membership organization who maintains accounting utilizing quickbooks. This will lessen our time spent double entry accounting for deferred revenue. This ability would be huge for PDCA!

Brian,
The CANA auditors provided this specific request:

Currently, we are unaware of any way to run a report that shows Membership Expiration Dates historically – basically the Organization has a year end of 7/31/16, so if a member pays in August of the following fiscal year (Aug ‘16), then a report is run as of 7/31/16, that member will show a Membership Expiration Date of August ’17 despite not having paid before 7/31/16.

I think the best solution would be that if a report is run on 7/31/16, that the Membership Expiration Date reported was the expiration date on 7/31/16 (which wouldn’t be extended for another year until they paid the annual dues).

Thanks.

As I said before, deferred revenue would be very useful. In fact, the more we can do in YM the better it is for us.

I know that more customizable reporting of financials would be appreciated by our accounts dept - they are continually complaining about the amount of manipulation of data they have to do to get the data out of YM and into our accounting package (no, we don't use QB).

It is frustrating that most of the data we need is in there but we can't readily get it out in a format we'd like to see.

The ability to add an extra custom field or two to memberships/products/events would also be a useful addition.

not interested in this.