| Sage MAS 500 General Ledger Module | |||
| The General Ledger module combines power and flexibility with ease of use, giving you the critical information you need to make timely and informed business decisions and manage your business more effectively. The system’s extensive drill-down capabilities enable you to view everything from detailed journal entries to original source documents. Sage MAS 500 has the flexibility to accommodate complex company structures. You can set up an unlimited number of companies and designate account numbers with up to 15 segments and as many as 100 characters. Through Microsoft FRx and Crystal Reports software, you’ll enjoy the flexibility of virtually unlimited reporting options. The system also lets you maintain budget data in a spreadsheet, then update the general ledger through a direct COM link. MAS 500’s user-defined processing options can save time, increase productivity and enhance efficiency by allowing you to automatically add new accounts; print period end reports; enter, revise and maintain budgets; purge data and close the period. | |||
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| Screen Shots | Activities | Inquires | Report Examples |
| Setup | Utilities | Integration | Other Reports |
| Operational Flexibility | |||
| Effective Dates | A date range may be associated with any account to restrict account transactions to dates within the range. | Account Comments | A generous comment field lets you maintain pertinent information about each account. |
| Multicurrency Restrictions | Designate whether an account should be restricted to the home currency or another specific foreign currency. You can enter and report transactions in any currency and override exchange rates for individual transactions. Revalue account balances and automatically calculate realized and unrealized gains and losses. | Account Status | Designate an account as Active, Inactive, or Deleted. Deleted accounts are removed during period end processing. |
| Account Posting Type | An account may be assigned a posting type of: financial, statistical, or both. For statistical accounts, a statistical unit is designated (e.g. square feet, employee count, etc.) | Multi-Company Consolidations | Use Consolidations to select the attributes associated with each company whose financial information will be consolidated with that of other companies. These attributes identify the company’s role in consolidations and provide the mapping information needed. |
| Maintain Account Segments | Assign values to predefined account segments. A segment may be defined as division, department, or region. For each account segment, you may record a description and range of effective dates. | Account Shortcuts | Account shortcuts speed up transaction entry and maintenance by reducing the amount of account number information you need to manually enter. Simply press a function key, enter the natural account segment and then enter the account shortcut. For example, you could assign a shortcut of SW to indicate your Southwest region’s accounts, eliminating the need to recall the entire account number. |
| Maintain Budgets | You can set up a budget for each account. Once established, you can then work with one actual and one budget or up to two budgets and review the variances in those budgets by either percentage or actual amount. You can also view beginning and ending balances for any account according to the accounting period. Elect to allocate your budget value equally across all periods or copy budgets previously entered budgets and increase the new budget by a percentage or an amount. Use Excel to update budget information. | Budget Comparisons | Quickly compare budget to actual, budget to revised budget, forecast to revised budget, etc. View comparisons of current-year and prior-year activity as well as budgets. |
| Reference Groups | Use reference groups to add an additional method of tracking account information that is separate from the General Ledger account structure. For example, you may want to use reference groups to help you track projects that do not require the reference group to form an account segment in the chart of accounts. | Automatic Allocations | Automatic allocations increase efficiency since the system calculates your distributions when these allocations are processed. You may allocate by: a percentage of an amount; a quantity; amounts based on current period activity, year to date balance, current budget, or year to date budget; or amounts based on a template. |
| Allocation Templates | A template can be useful, for example, when you allocate an amount from one account to multiple accounts and duplicate this allocation for a number of divisions, departments, and locations. Of course, the account structure must include validated segments representing multiple divisions, departments, and locations where duplicate allocations are likely to occur. You may Substitute wildcard characters [*] for the validated segments of the distribution accounts to create identical allocations for multiple segments.) | Allocation Setup | Set up an unlimited number of allocation templates for automating journal entries. Use allocations to: Automatically post an amount from one source account to multiple destination accounts; distribute the allocation by percentages, quantities, current period or year-to-date balance or budget amounts for each destination account; create allocation templates to distribute amounts by department or other account segments; and transfer General Ledger data to another file type or application with export consolidation data. |
| Recurring Transactions | Establish and maintain recurring transactions that post according to a cycle that you designate (e.g. monthly, weekly). You can also designate recurring transactions that you manually select for processing. | Private Batches | Elect to allow private batches which restrict access to all but supervisory employees. |
| Custom Fields | Create up to four custom fields associates with each account. Designate each as required or optional, indicate its data type (i.e. validated, date, alphanumeric), and a list of valid entries if appropriate. | Financial Ratios | Maintain financial ratios such as average days to pay, and debt ratio by industry. For easy comparison, these ratios are listed beside the ratios for the company on the General Ledger Analysis Report. |
| Budgeting By Fiscal Year | Maintain budget information separately for each fiscal year and retain this information indefinitely. | Budget Hold | Set a budget status to Hold to prevent any changes. |
| Budget Copy | Copy budget information from another budget type (for example, a revised or next-year budget), from current year actual data, or from prior-year actual data. You can change the amounts by percentage or dollar amounts as you copy them. This copy feature offers a powerful tool for creating new budgets. | ||
Set Up  |
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| Flexible Fiscal Calendar | A fiscal year contains a number of accounting periods; for example, you might define an accounting period as one calendar month. You can define any number of accounting periods for each fiscal year. | Audit Tracking | Elect to track changes, additions, and deletions of your accounts in detail or summary. |
| History Retention | Elect to keep Periodic GL History and Transaction History detail for up to 999 years. | Choose Your Delimiter | Select the character you want to use to separate your account segments (e.g. - , ., +, =, /, etc.) |
| Generous Account Size | Designate account numbers as large as 100 alphanumeric characters and divide them into as many as 15 segments for identifying departments, divisions, and locations. | Flexible Chart Of Accounts Structure | Categorize General Ledger accounts into any number of similar account groups such as assets, liabilities, equity, revenue, and expenses. |
| Natural Accounts | Define your natural account as a separate account. While typically the first segment, Sage MAS 500 allows you to define any segment as the natural account segment. | ||
| Process Journal Transactions | Process both journal transactions and recurring transactions with this task. The system displays the status for any unposted batch:In Use, On Hold, Out of Balance, Balanced, Posting, or Interrupted. | Batch Entry | Journals are entered in batches that group transactions and define settings and defaults used to process those transactions. A batch can contain one transaction or hundreds of transactions. |
| Recurring Journals | Select transactions that occur on a cyclical basis to be processing in the current batch. Once selected, these transactions are available for review, editing, printing, and posting. You even have the option of saving a standard journal as a recurring journal to further reduce data entry chores. | Transaction Hold | Flag a journal transaction as On Hold to prevent posting. A Hold Reason field holds your text description pertaining to the hold. |
| Comments | A generous comment field enables you to record descriptive text related to the journal and to each individual transaction line. | Format Journals | Indicate whether the offsetting posting is debit or credit, whether you wish to enter a check number, and whether to allow entry of the offset amount. |
| Statistical Data Collection | If the account number referenced on a transaction line has been designated as Statistical, you may enter a unit of measure for the line. | Automatic Next Batch Numbers | Assign the next batch number with a single mouse click. |
| Transaction Types | A journal may be designated as: standard, beginning balance, or transaction. | Reversing Journal | Enter a reversing date for the entire batch to indicate when the journals are available for reversal. |
| Intercompany Transactions | Process intercompany transactions by defining target companies. | Batch Control Amount | Enter a control amount and Sage MAS 500 will warn you if the entries’ total does not match this total. |
| Print and Update | Print and update the journal to finalize your postings. Select the number of copies to print, whether you wish to preview only, whether you wish to view comments on the journal, and enter a Register Message you wish to appear on the printed copy. | ||
| Inquiry Options | Sage MAS 500 lets you drill down to any account balance, detailed journal or original source document based on criteria you define. You can view balances for one or more periods and provide ad hoc query capabilities without programming. Easily export your inquiry data to Excel, at the click of a button. | GL Account Inquiry | Use GL Accounts Inquiry to view information about selected accounts. The information displays according to the parameters you select on the Selection window. A Filter feature allows you to restrict the amount of information that appears in the grid based on multiple criteria. You can right-click on an account to drill down to additional account information, or to export or print the information that appears in the grid. |
| GL Transactions | Use General Ledger Transactions to view transactions affecting a selected account. Define the information that displays by using Select function. Save specific selections that you frequently use, by entering a name and saving the record. You can right click on a selected row in the grid to view the transaction’s original document or the source journal. |
Account History | Use this task to view the history of a selected account for any fiscal year and for any period, open or closed. The history displays the beginning and ending balances and the total debits and credits for the selected period. You can double click on a selected row to view the details for a specific period. If you have Multicurrency Management installed, you can view information for any currency. |
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Main Setup |
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Additional Setup |
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Financial Terms Setup |
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Consolidations Setup |
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Account Structure Setup |
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Fiscal Calendar Setup |
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Account Groups Setup |
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Maintain Accounts |
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Maintain Natural Accounts |
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Maintain Account Segments |
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Maintain Account Shortcuts |
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Maintain Budgets |
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Maintain Copy Budget |
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Maintain Apply Budget |
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Maintain Allocations |
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Maintain Allocation Detail |
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Maintain Recurring Transactions |
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Maintain Recurring Transaction Detail |
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Maintain Target Companies |
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Process Journal Transactions |
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Enter Journal Transactions |
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Enter Transaction Detail |
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General Journal Printing |
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Process Allocations |
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Select Allocations |
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Budget Revision Options |
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Account Inquiry |
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GL Transactions |
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Source Journal Inquiry |
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Account History Inquiry |
| Useful Utilities |
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GL Export |
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GL Import |
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The Export GL Data utility transfers General Ledger data to another file type or application. You can convert the data to ASCII text or comma-delimited text.
For the export, you define the data type as Account or Transaction, the format for sorting the data, the file type to which to convert, and the name of the file in this application. Based on those designations, you might also define the data source files according to fiscal year, budget, or journal. In addition, you can further limit data selection according to account numbers, segments, or transaction dates. |
Use Import GL Data to transfer data from another application, remote location, or company to the General Ledger module using either fixed length ASCII or comma-delimited formatted source files. With the Import GL Data utility, you can import the following: GL Accounts, Natural Accounts, Account Segments, Transactions, and Budgets.
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| Integration With Other Sage MAS 500 Modules |
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| Integration With Other Modules |
All other Sage MAS 500 modules post transactions to General Ledger. Transactions are posted to the processing module and to General Ledger. Each Accounts Payable invoice, for example, is recorded in General Ledger as a journal entry.
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| Reports |
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Web Based Reporting
All General Ledger reports can be generated and viewed through Microsoft Internet Explorer using the Web Reports module, at the same high level of security as with the module’s standard output.
Reporting Flexibility General Ledger Reports Standard Financial Statements Customized Report Groupings Custom Financial Reports General Ledger Analysis Custom Report With Department Linkage Flexible Period Posting Complete Audit Trails Future Period Posting |
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| Other Reports |
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