Music Monitor is not a finance system. We presume that your financial reports will be drawn from your finance system, and that what you need from Music Monitor is to regularly extract data to bring into that system. The following guide proceeds from this starting point. 

There are two types of financial figures that Music Monitor calculates. 

Salaries

The Salaries module contains its own reports that are built expressly for exporting the data from Music Monitor to bring into your finance system. 

See Salaries Overview to begin. 

Revenue

Revenue figures are held in the Student Accounts file. Records in here may represent amounts that are billed to students (or any other debtors), amounts that are credited back, or payments received. 

All of these records are Line Items in the Student Accounts file. 

Billing and Invoicing 

Music Monitor can generate invoices to send to customers. If you use this option, you will probably also use Music Monitor to record payments received. 

In this case, a Line Item is deemed to be "Billed" when it has been added to an invoice. 

If you don't use MM to generate invoices, you will instead export the Line Items to bring into another system and generate your invoices in there. 

In that case, a Line Item is deemed to be "Billed" when it is finalised as part of this export process. 

This is a choice you can make for each batch of Line Items you finalise, so it is actually possible to export one batch, and generate invoices from another batch, if you wish to. 

Best Practice

Invoicing Outside Music Monitor

If you don't generate invoices in Music Monitor, but export your billing lines to be invoiced from another system, your billing exports contain all the revenue information Music Monitor holds, so you don't need to do any other reporting. 

Nonetheless we recommend journalising the lines you export, to prevent them being edited or deleted afterwards. See Generate a Journal for guidance. We recommend that you do this as part of your billing process, after exporting the billing lines. 

Invoicing Within Music Monitor 

If you invoice within Music Monitor, the process to journalise is also your process to export data for your finance system, and we recommend that you do it more frequently than your billing cycle. 

Our recommendation is that you routinely run the Generate Journal script and export Line Items. The script is named this way because it is based on a practice of exporting data from Music Monitor and then making a corresponding journal entry in your finance system to capture all your revenue changes since the last journal entry. 

Find the script at: 

  • Common Tasks > Financial Reports > Generate Journal 

What this script does: 

  • Finds all Line Items that have been billed but not yet been journalised 
  • Marks them with today's date in the Journal Date field 
    • This prevents the line items from being edited afterwards
  • Exports the totals as a spreadsheet, broken down by Account Codes

We recommend that you: 

  • Run this process frequently, e.g. weekly.  
  • Run the script with the default search criteria, exactly as they appear when you start it. 

For detail on this script, see Generate a Journal. 

Changes After Exporting

If a change occurs requiring an alternation to a customer's account after Line Items have been journalised, the procedure is to create a new Line Item that enacts the change. For example, if a student is billed for 9 lessons but then permission is granted for a reduction to 7 lessons, you need to create a new billing line for -2 lessons. 

This is best practice for financial records anyway, and you may have it in place as a policy even before records are journalised.