Understanding Alternate Accounts

In addition to the following overview, this section also discusses:

• Alternate account mapping and SetID sharing.

• Prerequisites.

PeopleSoft delivers alternate account functionality for its applications as an optional feature to meet the accounting and reporting requirements of multinational organizations that operate in locations, jurisdictions, or countries where statutory or local chart of accounts and reporting rules are mandatory.

By using alternate account, you can enter and maintain both a statutory (local) account value and a corporate (internal) account value at the detail transaction level within General Ledger, as well as within its feeder applications. Alternate account operates with and fully supports the conventional corporate chart of accounts that is required for internal management and external financial reporting. You can also perform year-end closing on alternate account only.

Throughout this documentation ALTACCT, AltAccount, alternate account and local or statutory account are synonymous terms and are used interchangeably.

In addition, ACCOUNT, account, and internal or corporate account are synonymous terms and are also used interchangeably.

Implementing alternate account in General Ledger and its feeder systems, such as Receivables and Payables, requires close coordination of ChartFields, business units and ledgers within the system. Alternate account is best put into place when it is a part of the original overall implementation plan; however, you can add it at a later date.

Alternate account is designed for international companies to meet local or national statutory requirements at the journal line or transaction level. Therefore, it is available in General Ledger, as well as general ledger feeder applications, subsystems, and other products, as detailed in the following list:

• Payables

• Receivables

• Asset Management

• Billing

• Expenses

• General Ledger

• Inventory

• Cash Management

• Deal Management

• Risk Management

• Order Management

• Project Costing

• Purchasing

General Ledger is not required to use alternate account with other PeopleSoft products.

You map ALTACCT and ACCOUNT values to one another in either a one-to-one or one-to-many relationship.

The basic level of reporting is defined by the level of detail in the statutory chart of accounts. The most common scenario is that of one or many account values mapped to one alternate account value. This mapping is done by using the Alternate Account page.

If you map one account value to one or many alternate account values, you use the Account page. The mapping of one corporate (internal) account to many statutory alternate accounts is less common. In this scenario, ALTACCT level detail does not contain the basic elements of the transactions in support of detailed alternate account reporting.

You can also provide values for ACCOUNT to ALTACCT and ALTACCT to ACCOUNT suspense. The Journal Edit process uses these entries as the suspense account and alternate account if an Account or Altacct value that is used in a journal is not mapped to an alternate account or account. Suspense entries are errors that must be corrected. If you leave the suspense fields blank, the Journal Edit process also shows the line as an error that must be corrected.

Although you can map an account to multiple alternate accounts and also map an alternate account to multiple accounts, you enter transactions in a one-to-one relationship.

When you enter a transaction in the General Ledger or its feeder systems by using a primary Account ChartField, or corporate accounts, the system also enters the transaction to the alternate account.

Similarly, when you enter a transaction to the Alternate Account ChartField, statutory accounts, the system enters the transaction to the corporate or primary account ChartField.

You can override these values by selecting other values from prompt lists that display only mapped values.

Alternate account relationships can be different for various countries or local reporting entities using PeopleSoft SetID functionality.

You can also designate an alternate account value as a Control Account to make certain that control account updates are generated only through system processes. This helps to ensure that the total of the detail that is in the various related feeder systems, such as Payables, Billing and Accounts Receivable, equals the total of the control account that is maintained by the feeder system for the general ledger.

You can do consolidations over alternate account when you designate alternate account as the anchor ChartField. This provides added flexibility for multinational companies that prepare consolidated statutory financial statements in compliance with local or government reporting requirements.