Access Financials enables you to create your own chart of accounts using segmented coding which can be easily interpreted and therefore identified.
You can set up the different segments referred to as categories in the system and then build your chart of accounts using the Chart of Accounts builder.
Each nominal account code consists of predefined segments or categories, and each segment or category relates to a different part of your company.
You can set up eight categories for use and the resulting nominal codes can be a maximum of 25 characters, but this includes the currency identifier , which is added to the end of the code, as an example, LOND-SALE-1000. For more information on the set up of the categories and the Advanced Nominal Ledger, please refer to the Step by step guide on how to set up Advanced Nominal Ledger article.
This means that you have 22 characters that you can use for your categories and this includes the separator. The current separators that you can choose from are:
None
Hyphen - most commonly used
Slash
Space
Example used for reference:
Your company has offices in London and in Oxford, and you have selected the hyphen separator. You have created the records in each category as per the step by step guide on the Categories set up article.
Category1 identifies the office of your company (London and Oxford).
Category 2 identifies the department of your company (sales and general).
Category 3 records the details of the income or cost (1000, 1500, 200 etc).
As per the above set up, you can set up a nominal account of LOND-SALE-1000 which can be quickly identified as London for the office, Sales for the department and 1000 for recording your income.
You can also set up a nominal account for OXFR-GENR-2000 which can be easily identified as Oxford for the office, General for the department and 2000 for recording your costs.
Considerations when planning:
An understanding of how the nominal ledger account codes and names will be created will help you to decide whether to use numeric or character codes and how best to utilise the short name.
When the nominal ledger accounts are built,
their account codes are made up from the category codes, the currency identifier, with a separator.
the account names are made up from the short names, also with the selected separator so from the above example you could have Lond-Sales-1000.
Set up used for the above example:
Code | Name | Short Name |
LOND | London | Lndn |
SALE | Sales | Sls |
The advantages of having the above structure are:
Selection of the correct code when entering transactions is made easier.
Pre-selection of part of the code by selecting category defaults can simplify this still further.
Flexibility when creating the Chart of Accounts and subsequent nominal records by specifying the analysis records to be created at the same time.
Enquiries and reports can be grouped by the categories of the code providing very flexible reporting options, for the example above, you can report on sales of each product grouped by branch or department.