Purpose
To reconcile what your Blackpurl indicates is the total of Customer Deposits and compare that to what your Customer Deposit General Ledger in your accounting package indicates
In theory they should match!
How often should you do this reconciliation
It is recommended that you perform this reconciliation on a regular basis and at the very least at the end of every month
If this process is done on a regular basis, the Dealership knows that the Customer Deposits are correct and if there are any issues, they can be picked up and corrected straight away
Understanding what Customer Deposit General Ledger actually is
It is the value of all unused deposits on Customer Orders in Blackpurl
The Customer has paid a Deposit and it has been processed onto a Customer Order but the Deposit has not been used (yet)
At any time you should be able to see in both Blackpurl and your accounting package how much you hold as Customer Deposits
Important information:
It is a true clearing account and is controlled / managed by Blackpurl
Blackpurl will control both the debits and credits coming in and out of this General Ledger
To prevent reconciliation issues the Dealership should never post entries manually/directly into the Accounting Package which affects the Customer Deposit General Ledger account
Also as part of what should be your standard practices in your Accounting Package, you should never modify or delete a transaction or journal entry that was generated by the Blackpurl integration
If you need to change something that the Blackpurl integration posted into your Accounting Package, make the correction in Blackpurl instead
What you need to reconcile:
Blackpurl
Run the Customer Deposit Account report in Blackpurl
This is the relevant article - Blackpurl Reporting - Customer Deposit Account and once you have the Customer Deposit Account total then compare them to the relevant Customer Deposit Account General Ledger/s in your Accounting Package
Tip: Did you know you can schedule to run this report at a specific date/time ie end of each month at midnight and have it emailed to you? To use this functionality, please review our article - Reporting - Scheduled Reporting
Accounting Package - Xero or QuickBooks Online
At the same time run a Balance sheet from your accounting package as of the “reconcile date” which will give you the balance of the Customer Deposit General Ledger account
To know which General Ledger you need to check, review this field:
System Settings > Accounting Integration - Control Account - Customer Deposits
In our example below, the General Ledger that we would be balancing out to is - 1010 BP Customer Deposits
Once you know which General Ledger to review in your Accounting Package, take notice of the balance of that General Ledger
Compare
Then simply compare the totals from Blackpurl Customer Deposit Report that you just generated to your Balance Sheet > Customer Deposit General Ledger
What if there is a variance between Blackpurl and the Customer Deposit General Ledger:
If both the Customer Deposit total in Blackpurl and the Customer Deposit General Ledger matches, then no further work is required
If it doesn't balance, the dealership will need to work out why it doesn't balance ie maybe someone has manually added a new transaction into the Customer Deposit General Ledger OR manually changed a figure etc
Things for the Dealership to check if it doesn't balance:
- Has someone processed a manual transactions directly to the Customer Deposit General Ledger?
- Has someone changed/modified an integrated transaction from Blackpurl?
- As you should be balancing this General Ledger on a regular basis, check each transaction from the last time the Dealership balanced out
If you still cannot find the cause then it might be possible for the Blackpurl Support team to look at the daily logs in the backend of your Blackpurl and tell you which individual day/s reported a change in variance - then at least you will have a date frame as to when the variance happened for you to investigate further