Once recurrent transaction templates have been created, these templates need to be used regularly to generate the transactions that will be applied to the balances of your accounts. Shepherd's Staff has a method of reminding you when these recurrent transaction templates should be generated.
In the Shepherd's Staff Central Toolbar, whenever you have recurrent transactions that have come due, or are past due, you'll see a red circle with an "i" in it. Clicking on this will reveal how many recurrent activities you have due, and if you click on the number you'll be taken to the recurrent transactions grid, where you can generate your recurrent transactions.
- On the "Recurrent" grid of the "Activities" view of the Finance module, click the "Generate" button at the bottom of the grid.
- In the window that appears, you'll first select if you're wanting to generate the transactions for all the templates you see in the grid of this window, or only for the templates you highlight in the "Generate for" section.
- In the "Date to put on transactions" section, you can tell the system to either apply "The Next date" or "This date". The first option will apply whatever date is in the next field of each template to the transaction that is generated for that transaction. If you choose "This Date", you'll get to designate a date that should be applied to each transaction that each template generates.
- The grid will let you search for particular transaction templates using a search function. You can also filter by when these templates are due by, or by activity type (Payment, Receipt or Journal Entry), or by Frequency.
- If you chose the "Only the highlighted templates" option, you can select which templates you want to generate by holding down either the Shift or CTRL keys on your keyboard and then clicking on each template you want to generate.
- When you click "OK", the templates you selected will generate their transactions. You will not exit this window however, this will allow you to generate another round of transactions if you had multiple iterations of a transaction to generate from a single template.
- Click "Close" to exit the window.
If you wish to end a recurring transaction template before its Stop date, you have the ability to do that as well from the Generate window.
- On the "Recurrent" grid of the "Activities" section of the Finance module, click the "Generate" button at the bottom of the grid.
- In the window that appears, click on the transaction you wish to end to highlight it.
- Click "Stop" at the bottom of the grid.
- This will bring up a window letting you know that it's going to stop this recurrent transaction going forward. It does this by changing the end date of the transaction to be one day before the "Next" date. Click "Yes" to confirm your choice.