September 10, 2009

gptip42day - 'Allow Account Entry'


One recurring issue, at least in my experience, is clients keeping their Accounts Payable control account reconciled to the AP Trial Balance.  A frequent contributor to this is general journal entries being posted to the control account.  We're going to look at the way to prevent this, not just in the AP account, but all control accounts in your general ledger.

Look at the Account Card screenshot below -


When the 'Allow Account Entry' box is checked, this account can be entered in distributions in any transaction.  Unchecking this box will prevent the manual entry of this account in a distribution window.  To that you might say 'Yes, but sometimes we need to enter this account into a transaction'.  To which I would respond - 'No, you don't.  Not if your system is setup correctly'.

If you need to manually enter a control account in a distribution window, your Posting Accounts setup is incorrect, whether it's Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, Inventory, or any other module.

Unchecking this box will prevent posting a manual journal entry to your AP control account, thereby eliminating one of the most frequent causes of the account being out of balance with the AP Trial Balance.

In fact, not only should you uncheck this box for the Accounts Payable account, the same should be done for the rest of your control accounts so they'll tie to their underlying (subsidiary ledger) -

Cash (Checkbook Register)
Accounts Receivable (AR Trial Balance)
Inventory (Stock Status Report)
Fixed Assets (Fixed Asset Depreciation Report)
Purchase Accrual (Received not Invoiced Report)

Now, if you want to take a further step to control this, take access away from the Account Maintenance window to all but one person who is responsible for maintaining accounts.  If that isn't possible and you have Field Level Security, apply a password to this field and provide it to one person, perhaps the controller or accounting manager.

Prevent manual journal entries into these accounts.  You'll be glad you did.

3 comments:

Christina Belding said...

Excellent as always!

The extra added bonus here is that you also list the GP reports that should be run to reconcile against the ledger...you are my hero!

BuckShot said...

I don't understand the comment above where she says "The extra added bonus here is that you also list the GP reports that should be run to reconcile against the ledger". Is there a place on that screen to list these reports? Am I missing something? Thx

Frank Hamelly said...

Buck, I think what Christina is referring to is the reports I list in the article for each of the control accounts, i.e., Cash (Checkbook Register), etc.