Journal Entry Identification and Masks
When you create a new journal, the system prompts you with three keys that uniquely identify that journal: business unit, journal ID, and journal date. You can enter your own ID or let the system assign one. You can reuse the same journal ID throughout the year, or even within the same accounting period, changing only the date for each instance.
After you create a journal, you can search by document sequence number on these pages:
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Create Journal Entries - Find an Existing Value search criteria.
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Review Journal Status - Find an Existing Value search criteria.
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Open Item Maintenance.
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Review Open Item Status.
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Review Financial Information - Journals - Journal Inquiry Criteria.
The document sequence number for a journal also appears on:
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The Journal Entry Detail Report (FIN2001).
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The General Ledger Activity Report (GLS7002).
This table demonstrates an example where your subsidiaries and parent organizations can record monthly payroll transactions using the journal ID PAYROLL, because each journal is uniquely identified by business unit, journal ID, and date.
| Business Unit | Journal ID | Date | Total Debits |
|---|---|---|---|
|
US002 |
PAYROLL |
September 4, 2XX2 |
400,000 |
|
US004 |
PAYROLL |
September 4, 2XX2 |
430,000 |
|
US002 |
PAYROLL |
September 18, 2XX2 |
420,000 |
|
US004 |
PAYROLL |
September 18, 2XX2 |
440,000 |
Using these three keys to identify a journal makes finding, tracking, and organizing journals much easier. It also makes it possible to copy related journals and group them by ID. You can use the same journal IDs and dates across business units.
The journal ID mask enables you to specify a prefix for naming journals when you are using NEXT to generate journal IDs. A 10-character alphanumeric ID identifies journals. The system automatically appends the prefix that you specify to the journal IDs. For example, if you specify ALLOC as the journal ID mask, and your journal ID on the flat file is NEXT, your allocation journal IDs might be ALLOC00001, ALLOC00002, and so on.
WARNING:
If you plan to use journal ID masks, reserve a unique mask value for the regular journal entry process. Ensure that your regular journal entry users communicate with users who perform other processes, such as consolidations and allocations, so that no other process creates the same mask value as that used in regular journal entry.