System Profiles Screen 1 - Nominal

You may have configured your system to share the same nominal ledger databases across companies.If you do this then you should only run the year-end in one company as the year end moves the ‘actual’ values back a year (losing the oldest set of values) as well as updating the accounting period dates. If you ran the year end on the same databases in another company then the values would move back another year.

Setting this option doesn’t prevent you running the year end in this company – you still have to update the accounting calendar – but it does stop the process of moving back the values and the posting of the profit and loss total to the retained earnings account.

Income: Accounts From and To

Expend: Accounts From and To

These prompts specify the range of accounts within which income (sales) or expenditure (purchase) nominal codes usually fall.

It is recommended that you specify these ranges correctly, as this determines whether a P or a B is offered to denote the account as a Profit and Loss or Balance Sheet account when you create new nominal ledger accounts – you can overwrite the offered value, but mistakes would create later difficulties. Only Profit and Loss accounts are zeroed as part of the end of year procedure, based on the setting of the P/B item.

If you have a formatted nominal code then you may use an asterisk wild-card when defining the range.For example, if your nominal code format were "999.99” with the first set representing the expense code and the second a cost centre, then you might specify the income range to be "001.**” to "099.**” to show that only the first part need to be checked for the range.

Income: Default

Expend: Default

Enter here the default income or expenditure code to be offered for invoice or credit note analysis records. The default code may be overridden by codes specific to the customer or supplier, or copied from a stock or product record. In the absence of any other code to use, however, these are the codes offered.

Income: Suspense

Expend: Suspense

When you come to update the nominal ledger from the sales and/or purchase ledgers, should the transaction nominal code be blank or not exist then the value of that transaction is written to the relevant suspense account specified here. In use this means you must investigate the reason, and raise some nominal journals to correct any postings.

Income: P/L Disc

Expend: S/L Disc

Where payment discounts are entered for sales and purchase ledger payments these discounts are posted into the accounts specified here. Note that the payment discount appears under income codes, and the sales discount under expense codes – a sales discount is often shown as an expense item in a profit and loss statement.

If the foreign currency application is in use then you can specify discount accounts per (non-base) currency used in the ledger within the currency maintenance options.

Force Income Account Range

Force Expend Account Range

If you set these options then the nominal account code specified in sales and/or purchase transactions must be contained within the appropriate range specified earlier. If you leave blank then you are merely warned that the code you are using is outside the range, but you are not prevented from using it.

It would be normal to leave the expenditure account range option blank and not force the input; you may well purchase items, such as assets, which are not considered as expense items. For the sales ledger, however, it is more usual to set this option as it is exceptional to want to enter non-income accounts as sales invoices.

Bank Accounts: From

Bank Accounts: To

You may create as many bank accounts as you want. However you are advised to restrict them to the range of accounts that you specify here.

Bank Accounts: Default

Enter here the default bank account that is to be offered when a bank code is needed (for ledger payments and the cash book). This would normally be a current bank account, since most of the activity can be expected on that one.

The default code may be overridden by codes specific to the customer or supplier, to the (non-base) currency, or the payment type (sales ledger only).

Profit & Loss Control

Enter here the code of the balance sheet account that holds the profits accumulated from previous years (often called Retained Earnings). This code is used by the end of year procedure in the nominal ledger as the account to which the current year’s profit or loss is to be posted to before starting the new year.

Debtors Control

Creditors Control

These are the nominal ledger debtor and creditor control accounts used by the ledgers and the cash book when updating the nominal ledger.

Sales Tax

Purchase Tax

These are the accounts used to accumulate sales and purchase taxes from the sales and purchase ledgers respectively. In the EC this is the value added tax (VAT). You may specify the same account for both; however, you may want to keep them separate for reporting purposes.

EC Acquisition Tax

This is the account code used to post the EC acquisition tax calculated within the purchase ledger when updated into the nominal ledger. It too could be the same code as that specified for the sales and/or purchase tax.

Tax Control Account

VAT is normally paid quarterly, and if using separate sales, purchase and acquisition accounts you would post a journal here once a quarter to show the VAT liability. Whether separate accounts specified or not you would then post a journal from this account to the VAT payment account when paid.

Code Format

Partition Start

The code format shows what you have specified earlier in the Code Formats section and this option allows you to divide that code into a maximum of 5 partitions – each of which has a specific title.

If, for example, you had a format of 999/99 this would be split into two elements – the first three digits representing the account code and the latter two digits as a cost centre or division code. The partitions would start on characters 1 and 5.

Once you’ve entered the position where each part of the code starts, then a pop-up box opens you that you can give the narrative names to the partitions.