General Ledger > Setting up for Production

Use the General Ledger setup task to do items 3, 5, 6 and 7.

These steps below must be completed in the sequence shown.

These steps are...

1.	Set up the Fiscal Years and Periods

2.	Set up your Currencies if Currency Manager is installed

3.	Define the Chart of Accounts structure

4.	Set up your Chart of Accounts

5.	Specify AccountIDs for particular roles in the system

6.	Optionally add any other GlTypes if applicable

7.	Optionally specify commonly used AccountIDs for particular GlTypes

8.	Enter or Import opening General Journal Entries

Import or Enter opening Journal Entries

Regardless of whether you enter or import the opening Journal Entries here is what you do.

The example assumes that you completed all the previous steps, that you did set up a Suspense Account , that your fiscal year is the calendar year and you’re converting to the new system on January 1, 2010, that you’ve got the initial closing balances for 2009, that you’re under time pressure but that you’d like to be able to produce comparative financials later for 2010 versus 2009 and that you will be installing Receivables and Payables. Please read this whole section before you start doing any of it.

Since you’re under time pressure the objective is get up and running as soon as possible and defer doing any extra work to support the comparatives until later.

(1) Enter one General Journal Entry with a transaction date of 31-Dec-2009 that lists the closing balance for each Balance Sheet Account as at 31-Dec-2009. Enter the Net Profit or Loss for that year into your Retained Earnings Account.

Since you will be converting Receivables and Payables, do not post directly to their Subledger Control Accounts but use the Suspense Account instead.

After the opening transactions in Receivables and Payable have been entered and their Journal Entries generated those balances will be reflected in the General Ledger. Assuming all transactions were entered correctly the Suspense Account would then net to zero. If you were to also post those balances through this Journal Entry it would double them up.

(2) Run Forward Opening Balances to bring those closing 2009 balances forward.

There. That’s it. The only remaining issue is that we haven’t yet entered any comparative data for 2009.

When you have the time to enter or import that comparative data here’s what to do. Assume that you have the closing balances for 2008 and that you have or can get the net change by Account by period for each period of 2009. That is, although there may have been many Journal Entries in a period, we want to enter one consolidated Journal Entry that summarizes them all for that period.

As before, do not post directly to the Receivables and Payables Subledger Control Accounts but use the Suspense Account instead.

i.	Reverse that original opening balance Journal Entry dated 31-Dec-2009.

ii.	Enter one General Journal Entry with a transaction date of 31-Dec-2008 that lists the closing balance of each Balance Sheet Account as at 31-Dec-2008. Enter the Net Profit or Loss for that year into your Retained Earnings Account.

iii.	For each period of 2009 enter a General Journal Entry whose transaction Date is the last day of that period. For each Account that was active in that period specify its Amount as the Net Change in that Account within that period.

iv.	Run Forward Opening Balances to bring those closing 2008 balances and subsequent closing 2009 balances forward.