Generate nominal accounts for existing cost centres and depts

Find this screen

Open: Nominal Ledger > Nominal Accounts > Generate New Accounts.

How to

Create your nominal accounts

Enter the account details and click Next.

These details will be applied to every account created. On the final step, you can change the name and report category.

All other details are applied to all accounts created. To change these, use the Amend Account Details.
Choose the analysis codes and click Next.

The values selected here are applied to all the accounts created. To change these for use the Amend Account Details screen.
Choose the Cost Centres and click Next.
Choose the Departments and click Next.
All the accounts that'll be created are displayed. You can change the Name and Report Category.
Click Finish to create the accounts.

Useful info

When to use this

Use this to add cost centres and / or departments to your nominal accounts. This is a quick way of creating accounts for your cost centres and depts.

You can use this for new or existing accounts. For example, you already have an account code of 6000, and want to add cost centre codes A, B and C, and Dept codes of X. Y and Z. This will create all the accounts with the required combinations.

If you want to add budgets, memos or attachments to any of the accounts, you can do this on the Amend Account Details screen.

If you're only creating a single nominal account, use the Create New Nominal account screen (Nominal List > New Account).

Note: You can only use this if you have set Start with account number only in the Nominal Ledger settings.

Allow or prevent journal entries

You can choose whether or not nominal journals can be entered for this nominal account. This is only applicable to Posting and Memo accounts.

Journals are usually used for transactions that can't be entered using other Sage 200 processes or for making corrections when transactions have been posted to the wrong nominal account.

You may want to restrict the entry of nominal journals for some accounts, particularly when transactions are posted to an account automatically as part of a Sage 200 process, such as the Debtors Control account or Accumulated Profit account.

To prevent nominal journals being entered, make sure Allow manual journal entries is not selected.

Allow or prevent batch postings

Whether to choose to us batch postings depends on whether you're using waiting postings Transactions that have not yet been posted to the Nominal Ledger. These can be updated by using the Nominal Ledger Update Waiting Postings routine. to update your nominal accounts or not. This is set by the Update the Nominal Ledger immediately journal entries are posted option in the Nominal Ledger Settings.

If you've chosen to not to select Update the Nominal Ledger immediately journal entries are posted and to use waiting postings, then you can also choose to Use batch postings here.

If this is selected, transactions being posted to the same nominal accounts are posted as a single value, when Update waiting postings is run. When checking your nominal accounts, you won't be able to see a full history of individual transactions.

For example, if you post a group of five invoices and then choose to update your waiting postings, a single transaction will be posted to your Debtors Control account for the value of all five invoices.
If you've chosen to select Update the Nominal Ledger immediately journal entries are posted, then individual transactions are always posted to your nominal accounts straight away. Don't select Use batch postings here.

Show your account balances in lists

Here you can choose whether or not to show the balance of this nominal account on the nominal list and workspaces.

You might want to do this for sensitive accounts where you don't want all your staff to see the account balance. Your retained profit or salary accounts for example.

Keep transactions

In Sage 200 you can remove older data, which makes it easier to find relevant information, frees up disk space and optimises the system processing speed.

Keep transactions for - Enter the number of months (up to 36) you want to store transactions on this nominal account. After this time the transactions are archived or can be deleted.

The default for this is set in the Nominal Ledger settings.

This account must be a memorandum or posting account.

Changing this?

Changing this setting affects transactions the next time a period is closed.

Link to a parent company

You'll only see the Consolidated account if a parent company has been set for this company. This allows you to consolidate the balance of your nominal accounts from several subsidiary companies into a single holding parent so you can produce financial reports for the holding company.

Select the nominal account this account should be linked to. The drop-down list shows the nominal accounts from the parent company.

Tip:

A yellow highlight shows that the account entered doesn't exist in the parent.

If the account isn't linked, then the balance will post to the suspense account in the parent company, when you run the consolidation.

Adding analysis codes

Analysis codes can be used as custom fields or extra pieces of information that you can use to improve your reporting and to compare different areas of your business. An analysis code has two parts:

Code - this is how you want to group your data.
Value - this is how you want to break down the data for each group.

You create the analysis codes and their associated values on the Maintain Analysis Codes screen.

Here you choose the value to associate with each code. If you don't want to link a particular analysis code to this account, then just leave the value blank.