This chapter contains these topics:
The JD Edwards World General Accounting system helps you manage the general ledger and reporting functions for your organization.
With the General Accounting system, you can streamline the day-to-day functions of your entire accounting department. The system provides an accurate and cost-effective way of organizing, maintaining, recording, and analyzing financial information. This information, whether gathered from one site or from multiple sites around the world, provides streamlined transaction processing for timely analysis and ease of reporting.
For organizations that have offices around the world, JD Edwards World provides the flexibility needed to operate in multiple countries, each with unique currency, language, and statutory reporting requirements.
The General Accounting system works with other JD Edwards World systems to ensure that all information is fully integrated into the general ledger. In turn, the general ledger provides flexible and accurate financial reporting.
The systems integrate with the General Accounting system, as follows:
Module | Description |
---|---|
Sales Order Management | General ledger transactions - detail or summary - are created during the sales order update. These transactions are revenues that are associated with the accounts receivable invoice. |
Procurement | General ledger transactions are created during the purchase order receipt and voucher match processes. These transactions represent the purchase receipts and vouchers, respectively. Additionally, receipt and voucher information is created at one time by the Receiver and Voucher program. |
Manufacturing Accounting | General ledger transactions are created within the manufacturing accounting process. These transactions represent material issues, completions, labor hours, and variances. |
Module | Description |
---|---|
Payroll | General ledger transactions - detail or summary - are created during the payroll cycle. These transactions represent labor and labor billing distribution, burden, disbursements, and equipment distribution. Journals for labor distribution, flat burden, equipment distribution, and labor billing distribution can be created outside the payroll cycle, if desired. |
Fixed Assets and Equipment Management | The same detail transaction records are used by the Fixed Assets, Equipment Management, and General Accounting systems. A post program for fixed assets updates the information in the fixed assets balances file. |
Module | Description |
---|---|
Job Cost | Job cost integrates directly with the general ledger by means of the same, shared account structure. |
Contract Management | Progress payments that are posted, in turn, update the general ledger. |
Change Management | Transactions are created for each account on the job and are updated to the general ledger by means of ledger types. |
Typically, you generate transactions, such as invoices, vouchers, receipts, and payments, using other JD Edwards World systems. However, you can also enter transactions directly using the General Accounting system.
The features of the General Accounting system include:
Multiple ledger flexibility
Multi-national functionality
Reporting
Account balance consolidations
Budgeting
Allocations
Reorganization flexibility
Multiple ledgers provide flexibility without requiring you to enter unnecessary and redundant data. They allow you to:
Define any number of unit or monetary ledger types, such as actual, budgeted, or non-domestic currency.
Retrieve data about anything - from global revenue by product to an individual employee's expenses - without creating separate account numbers.
Maintain transactions in the appropriate ledger and post to the general ledger by summary or detailed transaction.
View two ledgers simultaneously. For example, you can view the domestic and reporting currency ledgers, or the budget to actual ledgers, with the variance calculated online.
JD Edwards World includes Multi-national functionality, enabling you to consolidate, restate, compare, stabilize, and process unlimited currencies in many ways. Multi-national features that work with the General Accounting system include, but are not limited to:
The General Accounting system provides standard reports. These reports supplement the online management summary information for detailed analysis. You can customize the presentation of information, as needed.
At any time in the accounting period - not just period end - you have access to account balances and consolidated information. Whether you review your financial information online or use printed reports, you can see this information at the level of detail most meaningful to you.
While reviewing account balances online, you can easily access the detail of the originating transactions. This provides for timely resolution when questions about a transaction arise.
You can review your consolidated financial reports online, anytime, and across multiple currencies and languages.
Your organization might have JD Edwards World systems running in multiple locations. You can group, or consolidate, account balances at these locations and send the information to a centralized location for statutory and management reporting.
The consolidated information that you create will be accessible to all standard JD Edwards World programs.
Whether your organization makes long-range plans that require high-level budget projections or short-term forecasts that need detail-level budgets, the tools you use for budgeting need to be flexible to meet your needs.
You determine the amount of detail in your budgets. For example, you can create budgets at the product level, business unit level, major account category, or specific account. You can also create journal entries for each account and budget amount. This detailed method provides for a formal audit trail and is used by construction companies and government agencies that need to record supplemental appropriations for an original budget.
To create budgets using a simple method, you can work with allocations or seasonal pattern spreads. Or, have managers create their department budgets using a PC spreadsheet and upload the figures into the final budget.
You can compare your budget-to-actual figures online using year-to-date, period-to-date, or any other time frame. This allows you to respond to variances in a timely manner. If your budget changes, you can create journal entries that explain the reason for the change to ensure that next year's budgets are more accurate.
Multi-national organizations can convert budgets into their functional currency for review at a department, subsidiary, country, continent, or global level.
With allocations, you can assign and manage your costs more efficiently and accurately. You can define allocations for many purposes, such as to distribute expenses and create annual or period budgets. With one simple allocation, you can create budgets that reflect an increase or decrease over last year's budget or actual amounts.
You can allocate from one account to another account, based on values in a third account. For example, you can allocate your monthly utilities expense from an overhead account to individual departments based on their percentage of square footage. In more complicated environments, you can create allocations based on other allocations and process them together.
This guide describes only indexed allocations.
See Also:
Work With Variable Numerator Allocations and Work With Cost Allocations in the JD Edwards World General Accounting II Guide.
Whether you are reorganizing to meet changing market demands, adding locations to take advantage of favorable business environments, or beginning a new project, you might need to change your organizational structure.
Traditionally, when organizations have changed their reporting structure, it has entailed reworking the chart of accounts, followed by a time-consuming data conversion to get the historical data into the new account coding design. With the General Accounting system, you can change your reporting structure in an efficient, timely manner. As you change an account number, the associated transaction detail and balance histories are transferred easily by the system, eliminating the need for difficult data conversions.
A free-form account number (that can be used as a cross-reference to an "old" account number) is available for the initial conversion to JD Edwards World software. The free-form account number can also be used for other purposes, such as resequencing a balance sheet. You can design a balance sheet that complies with your auditor's needs without affecting the balance sheet that is meaningful to you.
This guide uses the Business Unit.Object.Subsidiary standard notation for account numbers.
Figure 1-1 Business Unit.Object.Subsidiary Standard Notation for Account Numbers
The account number includes both the Where and What. You can use periods, commas, or other user defined symbols to separate the components of the account number. The period (.) separator is the default.
The business unit describes where in your organization the transaction will have an impact. It represents the lowest organizational level within your business - where you record all revenues, expenses, assets, liabilities, and equities. For example, a business unit can be a department, branch office, or truck.
Business units are unique 12-character, alphanumeric fields. The following applies:
A business unit can belong to only one company.
A company can have several business units.
Each company has at least one business unit for the balance sheet.
The Object.Subsidiary represents what type of transaction is being created. An object is a description of the transaction, for example, Cash in Bank. A subsidiary is an expanded description of the object account, for example, Cash in Bank.FNB (First National Bank).
There are two parts of the "what":
Object (four or six characters, depending on your organization's setup)
You can set up a five-character object if you are implementing the flexible chart of accounts feature.
Subsidiary (one to eight characters)
Figure 1-2 General Accounting System Flow
The General Accounting system uses the following primary tables:
Table | Description |
---|---|
Account Master (F0901) | Stores account definitions, including account numbers and descriptions. There is one record per account. |
Account Balances (F0902) | Stores account balances, for example, net postings for each period and prior year balances (net and cumulative). There is one record per account/ledger type/subledger/fiscal year/transaction currency (if you post by currency). Also stores Enhanced Subledger Analysis information which allows for more detailed accounting for invoices and vouchers. |
Account Ledger (F0911) | Stores transaction detail in the general ledger. There is one record per transaction line item that is not currency related. When you use multiple currencies, there are two records per transaction line item, one domestic and one foreign. Also stores Enhanced Subledger Analysis information which allows for more detailed accounting for invoices and vouchers. |
Next Numbers (F0002) | Stores the next available number for all automatically assigned numbers in the system, such as batch numbers and transaction numbers. |
User Defined Codes (F0005) | Stores user defined codes and their descriptions. |
Business Unit Master (F0006) | Stores business unit definitions, including name and number, company, and category codes. |
Fiscal Date Patterns (F0008) | Stores the different fiscal date patterns that are set up for use by any company on the system. |
General Constants (F0009) | Stores the rules that control General Accounting system-wide issues, such as account coding, batch control, batch approval, date validation, intercompany settlements, currency conversion, and batch balancing. |
Company Constants (F0010) | Stores company definitions, including number and name, fiscal date pattern, and current period. |
Batch Control Records (F0011) | Stores identification header records for each batch. |
Automatic Accounting Instructions (F0012) | Stores the rules that control how the system creates automatic balancing entries, special interim totals for reports, and general information about the chart of accounts. |
52-Period Fiscal Patterns (F0008B) | Stores the ending dates of fiscal periods for 52-period accounting. |
52-Period Accounting Account Balances (F0902B) | Stores the 52-period version of the Account Balances table. |
Sales/Use/VAT Tax (F0018) | Stores the transaction detail for each item that is subject to tax. |
Ledger Type Master (F0025) | Stores rules for specific ledger types, such as:
|
Business Unit Data Types (F00690) | Stores descriptions of supplemental data types for each business unit. |