Balancing ChartFields

Business unit or a ChartField is said to be balancing when you require debit amounts to equal credit amounts to maintain a balanced set of accounts for the particular business unit or ChartField.

Defining balancing ChartFields is done on the Ledger Group definition using the Ledger Groups - Balancing page. A balanced detail ledger requires that the debit amounts equal the credit amounts for business unit, base currency code, book code and adjustment type.

When you select additional ChartFields for balancing, all unique occurrences of the combination of values must be in balance. You can choose to have the system automatically generate intraunit balancing entries for transactions that involve multiple values of a balanced ChartField. If you do not have this option active, or if the journal is not in balance for other reasons, journal edit uses the rules set up for balancing journals (such as, suspend or recycle) on the Journal Edit Options page.

For example, if you define department as an additional balancing ChartField, any journal created requires that business unit FR001 and department A have debits that equal credits. If they do not, the journal entry is out of balance. This also means that business unit USA01 and department B must balance.

You then see why account and alternate account cannot be balancing ChartFields. If for example, account could be made a balancing ChartField, business unit A and account 101200 would have to have debits equal credits that would always result in a zero balance for account 101200.