Understanding AAIs for Human Capital Management

You set up automatic accounting instructions (AAIs) to assign account numbers to journal entries. These account numbers enable the system to distribute labor and equipment billings, payroll disbursement, and actual burden journal entries to specified accounts in the general ledger.

During the payroll cycle, the system creates a journal entry of every calculation for every employee. These calculations include salary and wage expenses, burden, cash disbursements, and liabilities. You can create journal entries for labor and equipment billings and accruals for payrolls that cross accounting periods. After the journal entries are created and assigned account numbers, the system summarizes the entries and passes them to the general ledger.

You can set up rules to summarize journal entries. For example, because full detail exists in payroll, you might not need to track full detail in the general ledger. You can set up rules to summarize account ranges and business units.

You can set up AAIs for each company and for the default company (Company 00000). You should set up AAIs for Company 00000 first so that the system can use these AAIs if it cannot find AAIs for a specific company. However, you cannot set up a business unit for Company 00000 because each business unit can be attached to a different company.

The rules are flexible and changeable within the payroll cycle. For example, labor distribution account numbers can be assigned by company, business unit, group (union), job type, job step, and pay type. You can also define instructions for labor distribution at the employee level for certain employees that need separate instructions.

Every AAI table includes the Journal Type field, which contains one or more codes to identify the type of journal entry. Each table has a hard-coded set of journal types. Rules for some journal types must be set up. Other rules are optional.

Depending on how you set the processing options, you can use either of two formats to set up and edit AAIs: use the multiple edit format to set up and edit a group of AAIs, or set up and edit a single AAI by using the single edit format.