Next Generation - Step by step guide on how to set up the Nominal Categories for the Advanced Nominal Ledger

In this article we take you through how to setup the categories for your Advanced Nominal Ledger (referred to as ANL) and giving you extra information about the categories and their setup.

Before you add your categories, please make sure that you have ANL set up in the Nominal Ledger Options.

Example used for reference:

Your company has offices in London and in Oxford, and you have selected the hyphen separator.
You have selected the first 3 categories on the Advanced Nominal Ledger Categories set up which are:

Group Heading - top level, this will be your office category.
Division Heading - middle level, this will be the departments within each office.
Other Heading - lowest level, this will contain the codes for each nominal ledger code to record your costs and income.

Available fields for the categories:

Field	Description
Code	Compulsory and must be unique. Field length is determined by the value specified for this category in the Nominal Ledger Options. Cannot be changed once this category has been assigned to a nominal account.
Short Name	Alphanumeric entry field allowing up to 10 characters.
Name	Alphanumeric entry field allowing up to 50 characters.
Major Heading	Compulsory and only available for the Detail Category. Must be in the range of 1-12 and can be manually entered or selected from a list. For more information on Major Headings, please refer to the Major Headings article.
Account Type	Compulsory and only available for the Detail Category and can be Nominal or Bank or Petty Cash and defaults to Nominal. Account type can only be set to Bank or Petty Cash for Balance Sheet Categories which are Major Headings 7-12.
Reporting Code	Compulsory and only available for the Detail Category. Automatically populated to match the selected Major Heading and can be amended or selected from a list.
Inactive	Not set by default. Setting a Detail Category as inactive will not make any nominal accounts that use that category inactive. You cannot use an inactive Detail Category, i.e. you cannot manually type it in or select it from a list when creating a new nominal account or entering transactions.

Set up categories:

You have customised the names of the categories to be as follows:

Group Heading - Office
Division Heading - Department
Other Heading - Detail category

Click Financials then click Settings and then click Categories.
Note: You can see the list of the 8 categories with their default or customised names.
Select the Office category, then click on the Edit button.
Click the + Insert new record button to set the screen to entry mode.
Using our example, enter the following and click Save.

Code	Name	Short Name
LOND	London	Lon.
OXFD	Oxford	Oxf.

6. Select the Department category, then click the Edit button.

7. Click the + Insert new record button to set the screen to entry mode.

8. Using our example, enter the following and click Save.

Code	Name	Short Name
SALE	Sales	Sales
GENR	General	General

9. Select the Detail Category category, then click the Edit button.

10. Click the + Insert new record button to set the screen to entry mode.

11. Using our example, enter the following and click Save.

Code	Name	Short Name	Major Heading	Account Type	Reporting Code
1000	Sales	Sales	1	Nominal	1
1500	Sales Discount	Sls Disc	1	Nominal	1
2000	Purchase	Purch	2	Nominal	2
2500	Purchase Discount	Purch Disc	2	Nominal	2
3700	Exchange Difference	Exch. Diff.	3	Nominal	3
3800	Currency Rounding	Curr. Rnd.	3	Nominal	3
7000	Sales Control	Sls. Cntrl	9	Nominal	9
7100	Bank	Bank	9	Bank	9
8000	Purchase Control	Purch. Cntrl	10	Nominal	10
8100	V AT Control	VAT	10	Nominal	10
9998	Year End Update	Year End	12	Nominal	12
9999	Suspense	Susp.	12	Nominal	12

Note: To build the chart of accounts successfully, you must have the following default and compulsory control accounts to be able to map these when you are building your chart of accounts. In our example we use number for the Code, you can use what suits your business the best.

Once you have entered all the categories that you need for your company's structure, you then need to build the Chart of Accounts.

We will continue to work through our reference example.

Next Generation - Customise the nominal category names when using Advanced Nominal Ledger

Next Generation - Populate the Details Tab for a nominal account record

Next Generation - Step by step guide on how to build your Chart of Accounts

Next Generation - Step by step guide on how to set up Advanced Nominal Ledger in the Nominal Ledger Options

Next Generation - Useful information about the Advanced Nominal Ledger