Billing Management is currently incapable of acting as a reliable accounting subsystem. I am unable to take the prior month's A/R aging total, add and subtract billing, credit, payment activity for the month, and arrive at the current month's A/R aging total. The problem? It is two-fold.

First, BM continues to be incapable of providing a static A/R aging report so that a report I print as of a specific date is the same no matter what date I run the report. This makes any reconciliation exceedingly difficult because the beginning and ending balances are moving targets.

Second, while payments seem to now refrain from auto-applying the same cannot be said for invoices when a student's account has a credit balance. We just had a new term start May 2, which is the first Monday after the prior month of April ended on a weekend. My registrar had set up all the billing for the term with May 1 invoice dates and May 1 posting dates. So any student account where the student had made a payment in April in anticipation of the May billing all had the credit balances disappear when I ran an April 30 A/R aging on Monday, May 2. Making a further mess of all of this is that there is NO audit trail that helps me identify what was done when so I can perform a reconciliation, short of going student by student to roll forward their March 31 balance to April 30 using the April billing and payment activity, then comparing that to the balance that shows on the aging and May billing activity to see if I can make sense of the information. Student by student!!!

BM should be able to, without fail, take any given month and roll forward from the beginning of month balance per an A/R aging, i.e. prior month's end of month balance, add and subtract that month's activity, and arrive at the end of month balance per an A/R aging. That same roll-forward should be the same no matter if I do that today, or next month, or next year. Basic accounting functionality, in other words. Financial Edge can do this. Student Billing was able to do this. Why can't Billing Management?