Overview
If your ACME fee structure includes a percent + fixed fee, this requires a specific method for how you report on fees and enter them in your general ledger. While the percent portion of the fee has a 1:1 relationship with each individual item, the fixed portion is assessed per payment. Because the fixed portion of the fee does not have a 1:1 relationship with any individual item, those fees must be reported on without item information in order for the data to be accurate. One thing that you will want to decide is if you want to report on both the percentage and the fixed fees separately from individual items, or if you want to report on percentage fees with associated item data, and report on the fixed portion separately.
Auditing existing ACME reports
If you are using the following field in actively used reports that include item data like event, membership, those reports will need to change. You either need to update the report to use a different field, or remove that field from the report results altogether and report on fees separately.
| Field Name | Field Description | Recommended Swap |
TransactionServiceFee | Calculated total of percent and fixed fee for the transaction - will inflate fee amount if output on multiple items from 1 payment | ServiceFeeAmount - percent fee per item, can be summed in report output TransactionPercentFee - Calculated total of percent fee charged per payment (already summarized) |
Reporting on fixed fees
Three new ACME Standard reports are available to help you report on ACME fees. The ACME Standard Financial Reports Overview has a description of each report and an example output, and it links to a detailed article for each report, with all the report parameters and explanations about how it works. The main consideration is that fixed fees have a 1:1 relationship with transactions, and a single transaction can relate to multiple different items (event(s) ticket types, membership, donations, and add-ons). To ensure that the amounts included in a report output are accurate, only transactional information can be reported on with fixed fee data, and individual item data cannot be included.