c. From TUIO to QuickBooks (and other software)

In this article, we offer guidance and tips on how the TUIO data can be used to prepare financial statements in an accounting software. We use QuickBooks (QB) for this example because that is what a lot of our clients use, but the same applies to other tools.

A common impulse for new TUIO clients is to want to import all their TUIO invoices into QuickBooks and go from there. However, as most of our more experienced clients already know, importing invoices into QB is redundant, not to mention that it can be time consuming and prone to errors (on QB's end).

QuickBooks is both a billing and a bookkeeping software.

If you do the billing outside of QuickBooks, as you are doing with TUIO, you don't have reason to worry about QuickBooks invoices. That's because QuickBooks invoices are just an input feeding into their financial statements module (the output). So if TUIO gives you all the granularity you need (parent name, student name, program, transaction fee, etc.), recreating that granularity into QB is needless double entry work.

It is also manual and prone to error because importing into QB is not that user-friendly and will likely require you to go through and make edits.

Instead, what you could is the following:

1. Use your TUIO Export data to compute your Revenue and Transaction Fees (see here for a guide).
2. Create a customer account in QB the same way you would for a new family at your school or daycare. This will be the account that you use in order to recognize the revenue coming from TUIO; you could call this account 'online payments', 'TUIO payments', or whatever name that suits.
3. Next, create an invoice for this customer account, and make it for the amount of revenue that you have computed in TUIO for whatever time period you are working on (month, quarter, year etc.).
4. Similarly, you can create a Supplier/payee and create an expense to reflect the Transaction Fees that you paid from the Revenue collected.

The benefit of this process is that whether you have 10, 100, or 1,000 families, you will end up with only 1 QB invoice, and 1 QB expense, saving you the trouble of recreating all the data already present in your TUIO account, which you can download on demand at any given time.