The adaptable design of the Sage 100 ERP General Ledger module allows you to use your current chart of accounts or create a new chart of account structure from over a dozen industry-specific selections, making implementation quick and easy. Learn how to set up a new company account in Sage 100, as well as how to navigate the General Ledger module during set up in this brief Sage 100cloud tutorial by SWK SVP of STAT, Merilyn Van Zwieten:
Sage 100 – New Account General Ledger Setup
Welcome to SWK’s video series on Sage 100. This video is going to show you how to set up a new company in Sage and the basics for the General Ledger module.
We’re going to start in Library Master > Company Maintenance. I’m simply going to create a company code called “NEW” and I’m going to call this “Newco Inc.” Of course, you can see how I have addresses that I could fill in, but we’re just going to do this fairly briefly. I need to come up and activate the modules that I’m going to be setting up and I’m only going to set up General Ledger. I do need to click on the first two, because otherwise it’s going to come back and tell me that I need that. So let’s just go do that. What has now happened, is the basis for me to begin with.
The General Ledger module has been set up. Let’s switch over to our “NEW” company. If we come to General Ledger, it is going to fuss at me a little bit and I’m just going to pick on anything. It says it’s not been set up. And, yes, we do want to set up the module now.
General Ledger Setup Wizard
To start, if you click on the little hyperlink here, there are some very nice help instructions that you can go through that will give you some of the basics. Especially look at the overview before you begin. That will give you some idea on how to prepare. We’re going to follow the Wizard.
The first thing we need to do is to create an account structure. We have some nice options here, where we can create a structure. Do we have a main account? Do we have sub accounts? Or departmentalization? How ever you want to refer to that. Do we want to copy it from a sample company? What’s kind of nice is, if I click on one of these types of industries, I can click on the main accounts that this would set up and it would give me an idea of whether or not this was suitable for my business. I’m going to come back and then we also have the option of copying it from another company. So, if you have a company already set up in Sage and the business is similar and you want to use similar chart of accounts, this might be a nice option too. We are able to view the chart before we actually choose it.
I’m going to create our own. This is going to be something new. It defaults to a three-character main number. I’m going to change that to 4 and then I’m going to add a second segment. This will also be numeric. I do have the choice of alphanumeric. I’m going to make this 2 and I’m just going to call this “Department.” You can call it whatever you want. It’s just a name, but I could continue on and I could have up to 10 segments and I can use up to 32 characters.
Let’s continue on. We’re going to bypass Rollup Codes for now. This is where I define my fiscal year. I could start at any year I want and, as you can see, I can change the number of accounting periods and where I’m going to be starting when I open this up. I’m just going to take a default. As you could see, you are able to put in different periods ends because perhaps you don’t have a calendar year or you’re using something other than the months to define your periods. We’re going to bypass Budgets.
General Ledger Options Setup
There’s a couple things that I actually like in here that I’ll review with you. First, when all of the segments (and you’ll see what I mean by this in a minute) when all of the segments are an account number and let’s say I’m doing a journal entry. If they’re all there and if it’s not already set up as an account. Do I want Sage to automatically make that for me? Well, I’m not very fond of “Yes” because, quite frankly, I make too many typing mistakes. So, I like it to go to “Prompt.” That way it’ll say “Is this a new account?” and maybe I did it on purpose and maybe I didn’t. The other thing is, if a main account do I want to be able to create that main account on the fly? Because what we’ll see is an account number is made up of a combination of main accounts and sub accounts. Personally, I don’t do it for the sub accounts, because that doesn’t change very often. My next option is: am I going to keep track of changes? I rather like this because if I’m trying to figure out what went wrong in the back, maybe I want to be able to see a log of any time I’ve made a change. Sage 100 automatically sets up a Retained Earnings Account of 320 and then however many zeros you have to fill in your account number. This can be changed, but what would happen is, after you create your new Retained Earnings Account, you’ll come in here in General Ledger options and make that change here again.
You could see that I had selected year 2020 and period one, when I looked at the fiscal year and so here we are. Of course, I can change that and then I have number of years to retain general ledger history. I, personally, kind of like 10. So let’s give that a try. Coming over to the Entry, I can do batch processing for either general journals or transaction journals – your choice. How do i want to reset journal numbers? I have to say, I’m not particularly fond of the choices here, because it doesn’t reset it when you begin a new period or a new year. It resets it when you do period end processing or year end processing. So I’m not particularly fond of the other two options. So I just let it continue to run out. That way I know the order of which I have done all of my entries. We have a Budget tab. We’re not going to review this, but we do have a very nice webinar that’s been posted up on our YouTube channel that you might want to take a look at.
Then in Terminology, this is really how things are going to appear on your financial statements. One of the things some of my clients like to do is: they will come and put all of these in caps. If they want all of their General Ledger descriptions to be all in caps, well then, you want these subheadings to also be in caps. Or perhaps you don’t care for the term “Revenue.” You would rather have “Sales” or “Cost of Goods Sold” or whatever it is that you want. You can make these changes so that it fits your business and the way that you want to see financial statements. I’m going to click on “OK” and we have really finished at this point with the Wizard.
Account Structure Maintenance
There are a few more things to consider. You recall the account structure. We had named that a 4 and a 2. I could continue adding at this point. Remember you can always make your account numbers bigger. You can never make them smaller.
Account Group Maintenance
This is important and I also think it’s good to define this before you begin creating accounts. What’s happening here is, if we would create an account number that is between 0000 and 1500, so it would actually be ending at 1499. It is going to be considered a current asset. So you could see that these create ranges and you can add or modify the names of these. For example, I’m going to add a new one called “6000” and let’s call this “G&A.” The operating expenses here, how about if we call this “Sales and Marketing?” See it’s all the same here. Of course, I have to come in and define it as an expense. And the account types, this has to do with cash flow statements of which I am not setting up at this time. If I click on “accept” and come back in my Account Group, you’ll see that it is now in numeric order. So you want to change these. It’s so much easier to have this done right before you begin bringing in your account numbers. It just really saves a lot of time and a lot of hassle.
Main Account Maintenance
You’ll recall I said that an account number is made up of a main account plus a sub account. If we look at our main accounts, because I didn’t choose to copy from another company, I’m sitting here with 3200. So let’s fill in a couple. These are just going to be some simple ones and this is going to be “Cash in Bank.” We’ll call this “cash” and you’ll notice that it’s putting it in my current assets, which would be correct. Next, let’s put in “1100” and I’m going to define this as Accounts Receivable. We will put in a revenue account and let’s put “Office Expense.” You’ll see here, how it put it in under “G&A,” because of how it fits in with the account groups. Now, if you have a large chart of accounts, you perhaps are not going to want to enter everything in manually. You’ll want to import them. We have two ways of importing. You can use the GL Exchange or you can use Visual Integrator. I’m not going to review either one of those, but I just wanted to make sure you were aware that there was an easier way, rather than having to type everything.
Sub Account Maintenance
I have only defined one. So when I come down and bring in “Department,” I’m going to set up Department “00.” This is going to be my “Corporate.” So once I’ve done this, I am actually in a place where I can create my main accounts. Just to make a point, we’re coming to Main Accounts and you’re only going to see Retained Earnings. Once I have all of my main accounts and I have all of my sub accounts set up, I could come to a utility that says “Generate Accounts.” So, I’m going to generate an account for each main and department setting that is available. If I had a second department set up, it would create actually two accounts for each main account and you could see that I could set in the values. But let’s just click on “proceed.” It says it thinks it’s going to do five accounts. Let’s come back and we will see Account Maintenance. Here are our accounts. It has created all of our accounts. I don’t know if you recall, but each time I was doing something, I was putting in the short description and it creates the entire account description based on those short descriptions. Of course, you can see that we can continue on creating new accounts or as I had mentioned, we can import them. Now, let’s look at just a few other things that might be helpful.
Source Journal Maintenance
As Sage creates transactions, say if you also set up Accounts Payable and you do an invoice run. It needs the AP source journal. Sage will set that up for you. What I’m going to set up, because you’ll see that we don’t have anything in here other than a non-financial journal. I’m going to set up “GJ” and this is for my “General Journals.” I could set up “JE” or “JG” whatever it is that you like. I happen to prefer this because it matches the task description, but you do whatever you want. Of course, you can define what that next journal number would be. If you don’t want to start out with “1.”
Rollup Code Maintenance & Memo Manager Maintenance
I’m not going to review Rollup Codes. Hopefully most of you will have seen Memos inside of Sage. When I come to Account Maintenance (let’s just bring up this first), I have the option of putting in a memo. I’m just going to put something in here just so that you can see this real quick. If you want this to pop up, you are able to say “okay, I want this always to display because I have some instructions.” Maybe you want to make sure people are not using this account when they shouldn’t. So, it’s a nice way of being able to alert someone. For example, if you’re using the Accounts Receivable module, you’re not going to want to do a General Journal entry goes directly to the Accounts Receivable module. You’ll want to do all of that in AR. You might want to put little warnings that “don’t do this,” “don’t use this over here.” Just some of the nice ways that you could use some of the interesting features within Sage 100.
Okay, now that we have a limited chart of accounts set up, we could actually start doing journal entries or we could set up the rest of our accounts, either by hand keying them, entering them in through GL Exchange or Visual Integrator. Then I’m ready to continue on with another module if I so desire. Just one little hint: if I want to set up Accounts Receivable or Accounts Payable, I’m going to have to activate them before I can actually go through the Setup Wizards. If you try to do this without the Wizards, it will give you a little prompt and ask you if you want to come to Company Maintenance to do so.
Well, I hope this has given you a little idea how you set up a new company for whatever that purpose might be within your Sage 100.
Hope this helps you get more out of your Sage 100. We’re here to help you. We have a great consulting team and a help desk that is just waiting to be able to help you. Thanks for watching!
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