Auditor Back End Overview
Jewel Auditor's back end is where the magic happens. But remember that not all magic is good! The back end is extremely powerful, which means it's also a place where mistakes can easily be made and audit trails can be lost forever. The back end is the raw data behind the Jewel database. Transactions in any time period can be deleted or changed or added. Reconciliations can be hopelessly tangled. Beginning balances can be altered. Deposits and entire databases can be left out of balance. And none of this leaves an audit trail unless you intentionally leave bread crumbs.
If you are not 100% sure of what you are doing in the back end, be sure you have a backup of your database, try your fix, then triple- and quadruple-check that you did what you intended to do. Or better yet, consult this wiki or your tech support team for help before things get hopelessly muddled. We often tell church treasurers that there's very little they can do that we can't fix. This is not true of Auditor users. If you mess it up, we may or may not be able to fix it, so a recent backup is essential.
Below is an overview of the back end features. Some get used more than others, and so their description is more detailed. The ones you'll use most often are at the top of the list.
Current Month and NextStep
These menus quickly and easily change Jewel's current month and NextStep button setting. Changing these does not erase or move any data. It simply allows the treasurer to skip forward or backward to another time/step in the monthly process. If you skip a treasurer backward, remember that they must then re-complete all subsequent steps in the monthly process, unless they ask for help again. So if you send someone back to Start New Offering, they will need to write a second remittance check. If you back them up past Make Budget Allocations, they will have to make allocations a second time. Since you have more experience than the local treasurer, it is your responsibility to plan ahead so that redoing steps doesn't cause confusion, either in the treasurer's books or at the conference office.
For example, when a treasurer has just recently closed the month and realizes they forgot a check or deposit. If the reports have not yet gone to the board, you can move them back, adjust the next step accordingly and send back to the server. If it was a check they missed, you can set the next step to Print Monthly Reports, and they can re-close the month on their own. If it was an offering, they need the next step to say “Start New Offering.” And after they enter it, you will need to decide whether or not to change their remittance check to include the new offering, and do what needs to be done to move them back to Print Monthly Reports. See more information in Using Auditor to Make Corrections, particularly the pages regarding the NextStep button and remittance issues.
View Journal
This tool gets used a lot, as it pulls together information from the various tables in a way that's much easier to read than the tables themselves. There is no sorting allowed, though, other than choosing the type of transaction you wish to view. Transactions are listed in the order that they were added to Jewel, so they are loosely in order by date. The exact transaction order can be helpful when troubleshooting, as it gives important clues as to whether a treasurer probably entered a transaction himself or, if the transaction is not with the others of its month, if he had help from someone with Auditor access.
View Journal is where you will correct dates and perform most remittance checks edits. The majority of other needed edits can be accomplished more easily and safely in the front end of Auditor.
NOTE: The JournalID of each transaction can be seen in the left-most column when you hover over it with the mouse. The JournalID is the key to connecting the easier-to-read transactions in View Journal to their sortable, searchable, and slightly more-editable versions in Tables / Journal and Tables / JournalItems.
View Offerings
This tool pulls together the offering information in an editable, easy-to-read format. It's used mostly for deleting recently-entered extraneous offerings. (Remember that old extraneous offerings should be reversed, not deleted, in order to leave an audit trail.) While corrections can be made here, most corrections are more easily and safely made in the front end.
Tables
All tables are sortable by clicking on column headings. Bold indicates tables that you are likely to use. Italics indicates these tables are rarely, if ever, used.
Names: This is the same list you see in Maintenance / Edit Names in the front end, but in spreadsheet format.
Accounts: This is the same list you see in Maintenance / Edit Accounts. Note that the AccountID column is an internal Auditor designation, and is not visible in Jewel. You will sometimes need to know the AccountID of a given account when editing transactions in the back end, so find them here. Sorting by clicking at the top of the ID or the Name column will help you find the account you need.
Accounts_Bank: These are the accounts marked Type "Bank Account", giving the contents of the extra bank account fields that those accounts get.
GeneralInfo: This table is useful for entering the EntityId, for setting the NextStep button back to Beginning Balances, and for verifying the Jewel password.
Allocations, Archives: Not used.
BankRecs: This is a list of all saved and undone bank reconciliations. The BankRecID is an internal Auditor designation that you will need when correcting bank reconciliations. The AccountID tells which bank account the reconciliation is for. Date is the actual date the bank rec was completed. EndingDate, BeginningBalance and EndingBalance are the date and balances from the bank statement. An EndingDate of 12/1/1994 indicates that the bank reconciliation has been undone.
Reports, ReportsAuto, Options: These tables record Jewel property settings.
DepositSlip_Cash, DepositSlip_Checks: These record information from individual envelopes in the offerings.
Journal: This table is a one-line summary of each Jewel transaction. The JournalID is an internal Auditor designation that you will need to identify transactions. You will not often make changes directly in this table, though.
JournalItems: These are the breakdown of the line items on checks, deposits, and other transactions. If you need to correct which transactions are cleared on a bank reconciliation, that happens on this table. It's also useful for searching for transactions of a specific amount, either by sorting the Amount column, or by using the Find button.
Offerings, Envelopes, Contributions: There are better places to make corrections to these items.
Find
The "Find" button can be helpful, but is limited. Click somewhere in the column you want to search, click Find, then type in your search term. Click OK to search the selected column, or opt to search the entire table, then click OK.
Find is not case-sensitive, but otherwise is limited to exact matches. Searching for "Henri" finds "Henri" or "henri", but not "Henrietta". Searching for "28" finds "28.00", not "28.25" or "28.57"