Are you an arts and culture organization that struggles with the following?
- Tracking income and expense by event (show, performance, production)
- Managing the volume of deposit and ticket sale information
- Recording revenue recognition in future periods
AccountingWare's comprehensive ERP system, ActivityHD, offers solutions to your organization's challenges with innovative robotic process automation (RPA) that provides seamless integration with one of the best ticketing and fundraising platforms on the market, Tessitura.
Integrating Tessitura into Accounting
Theaters, museums, and performing art centers use diverse software to run their organization. Tessitura is a prominent enterprise system that helps manage key business functions, including customer resource management (CRM), ticketing, and revenue. The information it produces must also be included in an organization's accounting software. This is usually done with manual entry.
Here's where AccountingWare comes in. We are Tessitura's only Ecosystem Partner for accounting! Why? Because we offer full integration between Tessitura and AccountingWare's ERP software: ActivityHD. Integrating ActivityHD and Tessitura allows accounting departments to seamlessly transfer revenue data from Tessitura to ActivityHD without any manual entries.
If you are a Tessitura customer and want to know more about ActivityHD's innovations, then let's take a look at these simple steps to help integrate your data and automate your accounting.
Steps to Success
ActivityHD's integration with Tessitura is more than just an automated data transfer. It is a comprehensive solution that solves the challenges of revenue recognition, bank reconciliation, and creating an audit trail.
Draw a Map
During your implementation of ActivityHD, we will consider your Tessitura account structure when offering guidance on your chart of accounts. In addition to traditional account segments, ActivityHD offers additional dimensions called attributes. See our recent webinar on dimensional accounting to learn more.
To integrate Tessitura into ActivityHD, we will map out the relationship between the two. Each piece of data, like payment method or performance ID, will be mapped to import into the ActivityHD equivalent, like receipt types, GL segment items, or attributes.
Let the Data Flow
After this setup, you can transfer your revenue data from Tessitura to ActivityHD. You can run this transfer on a schedule, such as daily or hourly, or on-demand, with Tessitura login credentials. If you choose to import revenue data on-demand, you can limit the imported data by post number or post date giving added flexibility on which data to transfer.
This sophisticated integration does not rely on manually importing and exporting files (e.g., csv files) but is seamless, efficient, and automatic. ActivityHD uses the REST API Tessitura provides to securely communicate details like payments received for each event, payment method, or other information your organization tracks.
Automatic Accounting
When your revenue data is imported to ActivityHD, it automatically creates Accounts Receivable cash invoices with itemized lists of revenues and their applicable payments. This essential process sets up the proper accounting for income by event, reconciling bank activity and leaving a clear trail to match accounting activity with operations captured in Tessitura.
There are different revenue streams in all this activity, whether ticket sales, donations, subscriptions, gift shop sales, etc. ActivityHD automatically maps these sources of revenue in the accounting system with no maintenance for typical daily operations.
Revenue Recognition Made Easy
One of this integration most important and valuable is automatic revenue recognition. Think of it: no more tedious manual accounting entries to move transactions from deferred to recognized revenue for each event.
The AR cash invoice created in ActivityHD not only accrues revenue but creates the revenue recognition schedule. These entries, created with a feature called Extra GL, will move revenue out of deferred and into recognized revenue accounts on the respective event dates.
Check out our recent webinar on Extra GL to learn more about this extraordinary feature.
Expense Recognition for Events
Although expenses are not imported from Tessitura, ActivityHD can accrue expenses for each event and then expense them in various ways.
ActivityHD's General Ledger can perform complex allocations such as distributing expenses by statistical information (e.g., tickets sold), revenue by event, or a fixed percentage.
Combining expense recognition with revenue recognition makes it easy to create a profit and loss analysis by event, location, or other data tracked in Tessitura. Additional features like direct Excel reporting, statistics, and data visualizations make financial analysis more dynamic, providing better insights for your organization.
Bank Reconciliation
As you collect and record funds in Tessitura, you'll make multiple deposits into your bank accounts. At some point, these deposits must be reconciled with your accounting records. The cash invoice created by ActivityHD also automatically creates the deposit information used for bank reconciliation. At the end of the period, your bank accounts can easily be reconciled because the deposit data collected by Tessitura has already been posted.
Effortlessly Follow the Audit Trail
After your data has been automatically entered and processed, you may want to verify that all the entries from Tessitura have been correctly posted in ActivityHD.
Our unique partnership with Tessitura allows you to run an AR Invoices Listing report in ActivityHD and place it side-by-side with Tessitura's Posting report. The Tessitura posting number is used as the ActivityHD cash invoice number allowing easy tracing of activity from one report to the other for reconciliation.
This feature gives users complete audit control of the integration by easily matching data to ensure accuracy and completeness.
The Benefits of Integration
Most organizations can save hours each month by eliminating the manual entry of data. Integrating Tessitura and ActivityHD with robotic process automation (RPA) allows you to immediately receipt and invoice transactions into Accounts Receivable, making the accounting process more accessible and reducing errors.
ActivityHD provides more robust reporting and insight into your organization's finances, which you can use to inform your decisions. With your GL account structure and attributes, you can produce income statements by event or other data from Tessitura and get a clear picture of the profitability of each of your organization's endeavors.
The Tessitura and ActivityHD integration can free you from the burden of managing data so you can spend more time using that data to further your organization's mission.
Want even more details on how this integration works? Check out the technical information in our white paper: Integrating Tessitura into Accounting. We can't wait to show you what ActivityHD can do for you!