About Entering Account Balances, Historical Data, and Quantities
Before you can use General Ledger, you must at least enter beginning balances for the current fiscal year.
If you intend to enter period data for previous years, do so first. Entering last year’s ending balances establishes the current year’s beginning balances.
Warning! Do not post historical data if you have already entered current‐year opening balances and transactions, because doing so will overstate account balances.
Entering Historical Data
You add historical data if you want to do previous-year comparisons. If you do not want to add data for previous years, you can simply enter current-year opening balances.
Historical amounts include the opening and closing balances for the previous years and the net changes and balances for each fiscal period of the previous years. To add the historical amounts, you enter and post the historical opening balances and period net changes as journal entries using the General Ledger Journal Entry screen.
Note: If you want to show source-currency balances for all past periods, you must enter transactions in each of the originating currencies, along with the exchange rate at the time, and the functional-currency equivalent amount.
Modifying Historical Data
If you need to change account data for the previous year after you have created your chart of accounts, you should enter the adjustments in a batch, and then post the batch to the previous year.
Entering Current-Year Opening Balances and Year-To-Date Transactions
When you set up a General Ledger system partway through a fiscal year, you must enter the transaction data for the current year to date, in addition to the closing balances from the previous year.
You can:
- Enter all the current-year
transactions, one at a time, period by period.
This method provides a complete audit trail for current-year transactions.
- Enter all the transactions
for the current period, and the net changes for the earlier periods in
the current year.
This method provides an audit trail for current-period transactions, and creates accurate balances for previous periods in the current year. You can print comparative financial statements for all the current-year periods to date, and detailed audit trail reports for the current period.
- Enter the net change (net
increase or decrease) for each account in each period to date, including
the current period.
This method produces accurate balances for each account in each period of the current year, allowing you to print comparative financial statements. However, it does not provide transaction detail (such as date, reference code, and description) for the audit trail reports.
- Enter the net change between the opening and current balances for each account.
This is the quickest method, but it does not let you print financial statements for past periods in the current year and does not provide transaction detail for audit trail reports. Using this method, you would have to rely on your manually prepared financial statements for comparisons.
For the steps involved in adding historical information to General Ledger, see Adding Account Balances and Quantities to a New General Ledger.
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