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Global 3000 General Ledger is a high-performance system with the potential to store and present your financial information in detail with the minimum of effort on your part. However, to achieve this potential you will need to do some careful planning before entering any data into the General Ledger. |
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Before you enter transactions into General Ledger you need to define: § The General Ledger System Parameters. |
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§ Open first financial year in General Ledger via the Open New Financial Year option. |
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§ Accounts groups and account through the Account Group Maintenance and Individual Accounts options. |
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§ Profit centres through Profit Centre Maintenance. |
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§ Profit centre profiles through Profit Centre Profiles Maintenance. |
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§ Budget periodic profiles through Budget Periodic Profiles Maintenance. |
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§ Statement definitions through the Statement Definitions program. |
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§ Interface definitions through the Interface Definitions program. |
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Many details of the way in which data is organised can be changed; for example you can easily move an account from one account group to another. Other details are less easy to change and you should take care to ensure they are correct when you first set them up. The notes below provide some points to be taken into consideration when planning how to set up your General Ledger. |
Accounting periods |
You must decide how many accounting periods you are to use. Twelve monthly periods or thirteen four-week periods are the most common arrangement. You should decide on your financial year start/end dates. |
Companies |
The data for many companies can be stored in a single General Ledger database. When each company is set up, its base currency must be defined. Financial statements can be consolidated for multiple companies. |
How much data |
The database stores data for several financial years and provides comparisons between them. It would be possible simply to enter data for periods starting from the day you start to use the General Ledger. However this would mean that the data for the first year would not be complete. You should therefore enter data for at least the whole of the current year to date. You should also enter the closing balances of Balance Sheet accounts for the previous year, which then act as opening balances for the current year. |
Example |
If your year starts on 1 January and you start to use the General Ledger in May, you should enter the data for all the periods from January to April before you start entering data for your current period, May. |
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This approach would provide you with accurate information for the current year. However, many enquiries and reports make comparisons with previous years. There is a trade-off here between the effort you put in and the comparisons available to you from day one. In order to get comparisons between the current year and the previous year, all the data for the previous year must be entered. This can be a considerable task and you may decide it's not worth it. In this case you will have to wait until the beginning of the next year of operations before you start to get prior-year comparisons. |
Accounts, budgets & statements |
The other major area you should consider in advance is financial statements, budgets, account groups and accounts. You should set up your account-group/account structure taking account of the detailed information you want to report in your financial statements and the level of detail at which you wish to budget |
Note |
Budgets can be entered for each account and/or account group. However budgets at account and account group levels are completely independent of each other. Budgets at account group level are printed on financial statements, those at account level are only printed in the Comparative Report. |
Statements |
The account-group/account structure also has significant impact on the design of your financial statements. The lowest level of detail printed in a financial statement is at the account-group level. In other words, a single printed line could report on the value of a single account-group, or the sum of several account-groups. Details in individual accounts cannot be printed on financial statements, except as schedules. So any account for which you want to print details on a financial statement must be made an account-group in its own right. |
Example |
If you want to be able to print the sales of a particular product in your Profit and Loss report you must set up an account-group for these sales with a single account in it. If you added a second account to the group for sales of a different product you would be able to report only on the aggregate sales of the two products. |
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In order to minimise later changes to the accounts making up each account group you should therefore decide how you wish to do your budgeting and also decide on the level of detail in your financial statements |
Further details |
For further information see the Global 3000 General Ledger Manual. |