Accounting and Data Mining

By “accounting” we mean compliance and tax reporting, i.e. reports that are required to meet statutary requirements.

By “data mining” we mean Business Intelligence, analysis and reporting to inform and help manage your finances.

It is helpful to distinguish these two, because The Booking Service offers rich financial information, linked to booking data, but most of this detail is not needed for Accounting purposes. Most of our customers use an accounting package for tax and compliance accounting purposes, such as Xero, MYOB etc. The accounting package also provides your overall balance sheet and cash flow reporting.

The Booking Service provides an “accounts receivable sub-ledger” which tracks all transactions and member balances.

Ideally, your accounting package only needs that amount of detail which is necessary to satisfy your tax and compliance reporting, i.e. “Accounting” data. Of course it will also handle data that doesn’t appear in The Booking Service ledger, such as electricity bills, rent payments etc.

Therefore we recommend transferring data from The Booking Service to your accounting package at the most aggregated level that is sufficient to support the statutary requirements you need to meet. For example, quarterly receipts less refunds is a single number that you can transfer to your accounts – simple!

To access data from The Booking Service for analysis and reporting, go to Manage Bookings, filter on the first tab, download on the Downloads tab. One of these downloads will also give you the data you need to transfer into your accounting package.

You can also download transactions and member data (includes members’ balances). Raw transaction can be downloaded, and then uploaded into your accounting package if you want to duplicate transactions there.