The General Ledger keeps a snapshot of the state of each G/L account at the close of each period. This information is used by the system to re-create the financial status of your business for any period. This information can also be used to compare the actual balance and entered budget of various G/L accounts over a range of periods, to view changes and provide forecasts of future performance.
This program allows you to select one accounting period (or a range of periods) and do the following:
- Lock a period from further entries. (This prevents erroneous prior period entries.)
- Print financial reports (income statement, balance sheet, trial balance) for a single period or multiple periods.
- Review the selected period in detail and establish budgets for each account.
Procedure
To open this browse go to the Main Menu and select the G/L Menu, then Financials. This browse will appear. Now select a period from this browse.
NOTE: Upon installation, Simple Accounting creates a period for one year prior to the current accounting year, the current year, and one year into the future. This accommodates miscellaneous prior period and future period entries that may be necessary. After that, new periods are created as needed during the Period Update.
| [Print] | This button lets you select financial reports to print for the selected period, including a trial balance, income statement and balance sheet.
It also lets you print a General Ledger Audit Trail Report consisting of all entries posted during the selected period, subtotalled by account or by transaction ID. You can also use the Query Window to further refine the report if you need to see a list of line items for only one account, or from one particular source (items posted from sales invoices, for example). |
| [View] | Review each account for the selected period; establish a budget for each account and view the source transactions posted to that account. |
PRINTING STATEMENTS FOR MULTIPLE PERIODS
You can easily print any financial statements for multiple periods by tagging the periods you wish to report on. The periods must, however be tagged sequentially (in other words, you can tag January, February and March of a particular year to obtain a quarterly statement, but you may not tag only January and March.)
LOCKING A PERIOD
As we said, locking a period prevents any further entries to that period. This ensures that once your financial statements are correct they may not be accidentally altered by prior period entries. The general ledger allows you to use up to ninety-nine periods per accounting year and to continue to make entries into periods even after they have been closed. However, at some point you may wish to prevent data entry to periods that have already been closed.
To lock (or unlock) a period, simply double click on the second column in the browse (the column with the L heading.) When a period is locked, the key icon is displayed in that column. When it is unlocked, the column is empty.
You may not lock the current period.
You may not lock a period with unposted entries for that period in the G/L Audit Trail.
Only the Default Employee may lock or unlock a period.
You tag records in