AccountMate 6.5's General Ledger gives you maximum control in the management of all of your accounting transactions. Whether setting up and maintaining a chart of accounts, generating financial statements and reports, or creating journal entries and budgets, AccountMate General Ledger provides top-flight power and performance to keep you in control of your financial data.

Account ID’s can be up to 30 characters in length, with up to 9 segments. You can define primary account-number segments, departments, projects, divisions, locations, etc. Account ID’s and balances can be exported to spreadsheets and text formats.

Figure 1: Add Company

You can redefine account segments at any time. They can be added, lengthened and shortened; segment names, types and sequencing can be changed; and new major segments can be defined. You can even review all the effects before saving.

You can define up to 52 periods for your fiscal year, with options for defining weekly, monthly, quarterly or other fiscal periods. AccountMate’s General Ledger also includes an extra year-end adjustment period.

You can reconcile General Ledger statement information with balances in subsidiary modules by drilling down on the amounts in the Income Statement and Balance Sheet to find their composition shown in the General Ledger Listing. From the details of the account balance, you can further drill down to view the source batch's posting entries, and ultimately drill down to the source of each transaction.

With this feature, reconciliation of the major general ledger account balances with the balances shown in the subsidiary ledgers (i.e., Customer, Vendor, Inventory, Sales, and Purchases) can be done with tremendous ease and flexibility. (Please note: this feature does not work with Fund Accounting General Ledgers.)

Figure 2: Financial Report Drill Down

You can define a company’s fiscal-period date ranges and the beginning and ending dates of its fiscal year. In addition, a Posting Period Restrictions function provides the ability to cut off the transfer of data to any period in the general ledger from specified modules. This protects that period from further changes when a final statement is being prepared for the period.

AccountMate 6.5 automatically copies all segment descriptions to the account description, permitting faster creation of new accounts. For example, suppose you have three (3) segments. The first segment number is 100000, with Cash in Bank as the segment description; the second segment number is 123, with Marketing as the segment description; and the last segment number is 456, with New York as its segment description. When you create a new account ID, and you enter 100000-123-456, the system will automatically enter the description for the new account as Cash in Bank-Marketing-New York.

Figure 3: Chart of Accounts Maintenance Function

Each General Ledger account record contains a Period Analysis report that shows the account’s period-change amount and balance for each period selected.

An account can be designated as either a posting account or an allocation account. Amounts can be entered directly into posting accounts, or they can be entered into allocation accounts and pro-rated to specific multiple posting accounts.

Account numbers can be set up without exiting the current function. Account ID’s can be copied from an existing account segment to a new segment. Also, accounts can be copied across companies.

You do not have to close each period, which enables you to keep all periods of the prior, current and following years open for posting adjustment entries.

Journal entries can be created from scratch or set up from text files, existing journal entry batches or recurring journal entry templates. Journal entries can be edited before posting, as well as viewed, printed and voided after posting. Reversing entries can be generated automatically, saving time and reducing errors.

You can designate whether data from each account is to be transferred to the general ledger from specified modules in detail or in summary format.

When making journal entries, you can enter just the transaction date, and the corresponding fiscal period will be found automatically.

All financial reports in General Ledger are generated by Seagate Crystal Reports. With Crystal Reports, you can modify any report to appear exactly as you desire. Well-designed reports (including Income Statements, Balance Sheets, Statements of Cash Flow, Budgets and more) provide the critical information you need to better manage your business.

AccountMate offers multiple sets of budget data. Each set can be configured for all or a range of posting accounts, in order to review variances between actual and budgeted amounts. Budgets can be set up individually or by applying a percentage of existing actual or budget amounts. Budget amounts can be entered directly into individual periods, or annual amounts can be averaged over the fiscal periods. Budgets can be imported from/exported to spreadsheets or exported to word processors.

Financial statements can be prepared for individual, combined or consolidated departments, projects, divisions, etc., depending on how account segment types have been set up. Also, you can elect to show account balances in period-to-date or year-to-date formats.

Figure 4: Income Statement – Report Interface

When you select the Non-Profit accounting option for a new company, the GL functions, fields and reports are automatically modified for fund accounting, as follows:

• A Fund segment is added to the Chart of Accounts.
• Report headings, format and contents are modified.
• Additional reports are provided for fund accounting, including a Selective Accounts Classification Report, Statement of Financial Position, Summary Statement Report, Statement of Activities, and Schedule of Changes.
• Any number of Temporarily Restricted, Permanently Restricted and Unrestricted funds can be set up.
• The Retained Earnings account is replaced with fund balance accounts for the three fund categories.
• Automatic interfund balancing is an option.
• Eight fund types are provided, including General Operating, Plant, Endowments and Restricted.

• Maintains unlimited years of account balance history.
• Maintains account summary balances as well as transaction history unless purged from the system during fiscal year-end closing.