Keystone may be used as a sub-ledger to your accounting system. Record the details of donations and homeowner payments in Keystone, and record only summary information in your accounting system. This reduces the amount of data entry into your accounting system. However, it does require monthly reconciliation between your accounting system and Keystone in order to ensure the accuracy and validity of your records.
Keystone provides an interface to QuickBooks that allows you to post closing fees, mortgage payments, and donations directly from Keystone into QuickBooks accounts. Keystone Direct Posting eliminates the need to enter the data twice, which reduces the amount of work and the potential for errors, both of which cost time and money.
Once the QuickBooks accounts are set up by an experienced person, a less experienced person, with very limited access to QuickBooks, can do these postings. This allows the more experienced person to concentrate on other issues.
In addition, the ease of moving data from Keystone to QuickBooks through the use of Direct Posting improves the timeliness of the synchronization of the data between the two systems, which leads to more consistency of reporting between Keystone and QuickBooks.
Keystone also provides reports to help reconcile the directly posted data. These reports pull data from both Keystone and QuickBooks, compare the two sets of data and highlight the differences, which simplifies the reconciliation of the data between the two systems.
The following sections describe the process of using Keystone as a sub-ledger, Direct Posting, and reconciling accounts at month's end.
The specifics of the reconciliation process outlined here assume that you are using QuickBooks Pro as an accounting system, but the principles may be applied to any accounting system your affiliate uses. Note, however, that Keystone Direct Posting only works with QuickBooks Pro.