General Ledger Structure

The chart of accounts is defined once creating a pool of ten character maximum alphanumeric accounts - defined as Income, Expense, Asset or Liability and set to receive monetary and unit values if required.

Each company in the Ledger is then defined with a PC structure (two and four alphanumeric characters respectively).

The chart of accounts for each company is then created by "bolting" the Company/PC combinations on to the chart of accounts. This method:

• Ensures that accounts are consistent and not duplicated across all companies.
• Greatly reduces chart-of-accounts setup time
• Facilitates amendments of the charts-of-accounts
• Enables meaningful consolidation of accounts across companies and PC's.

Accounts within the General Ledger are combined into account groups for budgeting and forecasting. Financial and Management Reports are produced at the Group level with optional schedules detailing individual account activity. Therefore, the chart of accounts can operate at an extremely detailed level, without creating a huge burden of maintenance activity.

The General Ledger stores periodic balances at four levels of detail:

• Company/Account Group
• Company/Account Profit Centre/Account Group
• Profit Centre/Account
• Journal Transaction

This structure is reflected in a sophisticated set of standard drill-down query screens and can provide the basis for user-defined query activity.

Financial Year and Period Management

General Ledger can hold an unlimited number of financial years in a database. Transaction level detail can be kept until user-specified purging of transactions takes place. Periodic balances are always retained for enquiry and reporting purposes.

Future financial years can be opened at any time for budgeting and forecasting purposes or for processing at end of year.

Up to 13 periods can be defined for each financial year. These periods can have one of 4 states:

• Open - postings are allowed and balances updated.
• Closed - for periods prior to the open period in the financial year, data entry is disabled, for future periods transactions may be logged for subsequent posting. Past closed periods may be re-opened (if accounting procedures permit) for the entry of adjustment journals.
• Locked - processing is defined as completed for that period- no further amendments are possible.
• Deleted - transactions have been deleted from the period and only periodic balances remain.

Full integrity checks are performed when periodic processing takes place to ensure balanced ledgers.

Due to this flexibility of approach and retention of data across period and financial year boundaries, no restrictions exist for end of year processing. Closing the year causes balance sheet accounts to be transferred to the new year. Retained earnings from P/L accounts are automatically captured while prior year balances are unaffected. As opening balances are always reset by closing a financial year, financial years can be opened and closed at will. This is particularly useful at end-of-year when conditional balances can be transferred and then the year openedfor end-of-year adjustments. Meanwhile processing can continue in the new financial year.

Day-to-Day Operation

Journal entries from source ledgers can be posted at any time using the auto-entry facility. These postings can take place as often as required.

Journal entries are entered in batches, each transaction uniquely numbered in the financial year. Full journal validation takes place against Company/PC/account combinations and transaction dates are associated with each journal (thus enabling non-periodic reporting on accounts - eg. for sales revenue).

Batches can be multi-company facilitated by a automatic company balancing facility.

Data-entry is facilitated by the ability to copy batches or select transactions from previous batches into the current batch with the appropriate adjustments and an automatic profiling facility to apportion journal values across PC's.

Batch Types

• General Journals - for one-off transactions.
• Standing Journals - for repeated periodic transactions. Standing journals are copied into periods and period-end until their expiry date is reached. Amendments can be made after copying if required.
• Accrual batches - for automatic reversal in the next period by reversal batches.

Budgets and Forecasts

A budget and forecast can be kept against a Company/PC/AccountGroup combination.

Sophisticated facilities exist for top-down budget creation with periodic and PC profiling. Budgets can then be refined from the bottom up.

Initial budgets can be created from previous years actuals or budgets with percentage adjustments.

Forecasts can be created from budgets and then amended during the year. Actual values from the years trading can be copied into forecasts if required.

Reporting

Standard Reports include:

• Trial Balance
• General Ledger
• Forecasts and Budgets
• Numerous audit, systems data and batch reports

One of the strongest features of the General Ledger is a Report Generator specially designed for the creation of GL Reporting:

• Profit and Loss
• Balance Sheet
• Budgeting
• Source and Application of Funds

The user defines column and line layouts which can be mixed and matched as appropriate. Full selection criteria are available for consolidated reporting. Report accumulators and wild-card and sub-code filtering allow extra structuring of reports over and above the account chart of accounts.

Once reports are defined, day to day procedures can be greatly simplified by the definition of standard reports where the report characteristics (including selections) can be invoked with a "push-button".

Auditing & Security

Batches and transactions are uniquely numbered and can never be physically deleted prior to period purge.

For each data-entry session, a daybook is printed, detailing all the transactions in posted batches, including batch and item numbers and showing any batches that have been deleted.

Batches of transactions from source modules are transferred into General Ledger and validated and posted in one process. Transaction sources are captured by the daybook.

As indicated earlier full transaction history is subsequently retained until user-defined purging.

No postings can be made to invalid Company/PC/Account combinations. Account posting can be controlled by operator security level and control accounts eg. Debtors and Creditors can be isolated from data-entry in the General Ledger.

Databases

Global 3000 General Ledger data can be held in a Btrieve format or (to be announced soon) SQL format database for compatibility with industry-standard office automation and data analysis tools.