Create and amend an individual nominal account

Find this screen

Open: Nominal > Create & Amend Accounts > Create New Nominal Account.

Open: Nominal > Create & Amend Accounts > Amend Nominal Account Details.

Watch a video

Create a nominal account (video)

How to

Create a new nominal account

Open: Nominal > Create & Amend Accounts > Create New Nominal Account.

Use this when you just need to create a few additional accounts.

Tip: If you need to create a new nominal account code for every cost centre and department combination, the Generate Accounts screen is much quicker (Nominal Account > Create and Amend Accounts > Generate New Accounts).

Every nominal account must have a Code and Report Category before it can be saved.

  • Report Category: The report category determines whether balance of the account is for Profit and Loss (income and expenses ) or the Balance Sheet. It also groups your nominal account balances on your financial statements. For maintained schools, report categories are used to represent your CFR codes.
  • Cost centre: Nominal accounts used to record your income and expenditure (Profit and Loss) should also have a Cost Centre (fund) and a SOFA category. Only income and expense accounts for non-education services may not have a cost centre.
  • Cost Centre / Dept: Nominal accounts can also have a cost centre and/or department. These are used to divide your accounts and produce a separate P & L for different parts of your business.
  • SOFA category: The SOFA category determines whether the account is included on the SOFA report.
  • Consolidated Account: If you've set a parent companyreporting company to consolidate into, all accounts should have a Consolidated account.

You can also set budgets, record memos and add attachments using the appropriate tabs, when and if required.

Allow or prevent journal entries

You can choose whether or not nominal journals can be entered for this nominal account.

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.

Link to a parent

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

Select the nominal account this account should be linked to. The drop-down list shows the nominal accounts from the parent companyreporting 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 companyreporting company, when you run the consolidation.

Set analysis codes

  1. Select the Analysis tab.

  2. For each analysis code, select the required value from the drop-down list in the Value column.

    • If you have set a default value for an analysis code, the default value will already be selected.

    • If you don't want to set an analysis code value, leave the value blank.

  3. To add a new value:

    1. Select New Value from the drop-down list.
    2. Enter the name of the new value and select OK.

    You can only enter new values if you chose to Add New on Entry when setting up the analysis code.

  4. To enter a one-off free text value, enter the required text in the Value column.

    You can only enter free text values if you chose to Enter Free Text when setting up the analysis code.

Enter current year budgets

Record budgets against individual nominal accounts for the current year. Go to the Budget This Year tab. Choose the type of budget and enter the figures.

Note: You must enter budgets as a negative amount for all accounts where you're expecting the account balance to be a Credit. This normally applies to all Income type accounts on the Profit and Loss and Liability accounts on the Balance Sheet.

Tip: If you want to set an overall budget for a group of nominal accounts, see More about budgets.

Enter budgets for future years

You enter budgets for up to five future years. Go to the Budget Future Years tab.

Add memos

Memos allow to add comment and notes about a nominal account. For example, you might want to add notes about the kind of transactions that should be posted to the account, or when an account should not be used.

You can mark these memos as Active, so you can see which are still being used. Setting a memo as Inactive allows you to keep a record of previous memos. The Last Updated date shows the time and date amendments were made.

Add attachments

Use this to include files and documents about the nominal account to their record in Sage 200. You can store the file with the record, or include links to files that are kept on a local or network drive.

  • If the attachment is a file, a copy of the file is stored with the account/record on the server.
  • If the attachment is a link or a folder, only the location of the file or folder is stored; e.g. it might be a file or folder on your network.

Note: The filename can't have more than 150 characters. If it does, the name will be truncated when saved. If the file extension is more than 150 characters, the file can't be saved.

Make changes to a nominal account

Open: Nominal > Create & Amend Accounts > Amend Nominal Account Details.

Once a nominal account has been saved, you can't change the Code, Cost Centre, or Dept.

If you've created the account with wrong Code, CC or Dept and haven't entered any transactions, then delete the account and recreate it.

You can change the remaining information but this may have other implications:

Hide or show a nominal account

You might hide a nominal account when you're no longer using the account, or have created a new account that you don't want to be used yet.

This removes the nominal account from lists and helps prevent the account being selected by mistake.

Open: Nominal > Create & Amend Accounts > Amend Nominal Account Details.

  • To hide the nominal account, set the Active Status to Hidden.
  • To show a hidden nominal account, set the Active Status to Active.

Note: If you cannot change the Active Status, you must first enable the setting Restrict account selection to existing and active accounts in Nominal Ledger Settings. See Restrict account selection to existing and active accounts.

See About hiding nominal accounts.

Delete a nominal account

You can't delete a nominal account once transactions have been posted to it.

If you have created an account in error and no transactions have been posted, click Delete to remove it.


Useful info

When to use cost centres

You can use cost centres to segment parts of your business so that you can monitor income and expenses from individual areas in your company. You append a cost centre to profit and loss nominal accounts. Each nominal account has the same Code but different cost centres. For example, if you have several branch offices and you want to be able to produce a P & L for each office as well as one for the whole business, you could create a cost centre for each branch office. You then make sure that every profit and loss nominal account also using an account with the cost centre for each branch.

When you enter transactions, these are posted to the nominal account associated with this cost centre. When you produce your P & L, it reports the total of all accounts with the same code.

Tip: As all these nominal accounts are reporting the same thing, they should also have the same Report Category.

Cost centres are used to represent your funds. You'll need to select a cost centre (fund) for any nominal accounts that will be used to record the income and expenditure of your funds. This is likely to be the majority of your income and expense ( P & L) accounts. Most of your balance sheet nominal accounts will not need to be related to a fund, so these accounts don't need to have cost centres.

If you're an Academy, any nominal accounts linked to a cost centre with a fund type, and a SOFA category are included on the SOFA report.

When to use departments

Departments are codes that you can add to profit and loss nominal accounts, to help keep track of your income and expenses.

Each nominal account has the same code but with different departments.

Departments are additional codes that you can add to profit and loss nominal accounts, to help keep track of your income and expenses in a particular area.

For example:

  • A primary school might set up a department for each year, from Nursery to Year 6.
  • A secondary school might set up a department for each teaching subject area, such as English, Mathematics and Art.

Each nominal account has the same code but with different departments.

Creating additional cost centres and departments

You must create cost centres code and Department codes before you can apply them to your nominal accounts.

Open: Settings > Cash Book / Nominal Accounts > Cost Centres

Open: Settings > Cash Book / Nominal Accounts > Departments

Choosing the report category

Report categories are used to group your nominal accounts on your financial statements. Each category determines whether an account is for income or expenditure (Profit and Loss), or for your assets and liabilities (Balance sheet).

Every nominal account must have a report category, as this determines which report the balance of the account is included on and how it's reported.

Adding and amending report categories

When you first set up Sage 200, we provided a set of report categories for you to reflect the broad group of things required by most businessesschools. You can't change or delete these, but you can add additional ones of your own. (Settings > Cash Book / Nominal Accounts > Report Categories).

For maintained schools, these report categories match the CFR codes. For academies, these are categories common for most schools.

Tip: If you add your own report categories, make sure you also add them to your Financial Statement layouts (printed reports) and the Financial Statement Designer Excel reports).

When to use a SOFA category

SOFA categories are only required if you're an academy. They're used to group your nominal accounts together to be included on the SOFA report.

An account balance will only be included on the SOFA report, if the nominal account has a Cost Centre and a SOFA category.

As a general rule, all nominal accounts with a Cost Centre and a Profit and Loss report category, will require a SOFA category. You'll also need some additional Balance Sheet nominal accounts for the transfer of funds, pensions benefits and funds brought forward from a previous year. See About the SOFA report.

A predefined set of SOFA categories has been created for you. These are taken from SORP 2015.

If you need a different SOFA category, you can add new ones on the Report Category screen (Settings > Cash Book / Nominal Ledger > Report Categories).

More about analysis codes

Analysis codes are extra pieces of information that you can use as custom fields, to improve your reporting and to compare different areas of your business.

You can have 20 analysis codes for each area.

An analysis code has two parts:

  • Code or Name - this a label and represents how you want to group your data.

  • Value - this can be a set of predefined values or free text. This is how you want to break down the data for each group.

On each account, you can choose the value that you want to associate with each code. You set the labels you want to use for each code on the Analysis Codes screen.

More about budgets

Once you've set your budgets on your nominal accounts, you can also set up Combined nominal budgets. Use these to:

  • Group nominal accounts together to report on the rolled up totals.

    A combined budget allows you to group together any combination of nominal accounts and report on the rolled up total budget of all these accounts against the rolled up actual total balance (and any committed costs). This also helps you check that the budget figures you've set for each nominal account are correct, by showing you how much of the overall combined budget has been allocated to the nominal accounts.

  • Set a Budget Owner.

    Budget holders can then use the My budgets overview workspace to check actual spend against the budgets where they are set as the Budget Owner.

    Finance managers or head teachers can track the actual spend against budget using Excel reports such as the Nominal Budget Overview, and printed reports such as Budget Statement Breakdown by Department.

    Purchase requisitions can also be entered against combined budgets, with the budget owner as the authoriser. See Set up purchase requisitions.

  • Set an anticipated budget for a group of nominal accounts.

    If required, you can also use combined budgets to set anticipated budgets. Here you would provide a total budget for the selected nominal accounts that is more than total budgets entered for the accounts. This a good way of recording a budget that you don't want to fully allocate yet.

    For example, you might have an annual budget of £800 for materials but only want to allocate £600 to the budget owner at the beginning of the year.

You can set a combined nominal budget for the current year and up to 5 future years.

If you're a maintained school, your budgets are usually allocated at CFR code level. You might set up combined nominal budgets to group the nominal accounts by CFR categories, to help you track that you've allocated your budget correctly.

If you're an academy, your budgets might be allocated at a department level. You could then set up a combined budget and budget owner for all expense nominal accounts with the same department code.

About hiding nominal accounts

You might hide a nominal account when you're no longer using the account, or have created a new account that you don't want to be used yet.

This removes the nominal account from lists and helps prevent the account being selected by mistake.

You can check which nominal accounts are hidden and who changed their status, by using the Accounts not Active report.


Fix it

Why can't I see the consolidated account

The consolidated account is only visible if this companyschool has a parent companyreporting company and Consolidation is turned on.

To fix this:

Why can't I see the SOFA category

You can only see the SOFA category, if you're an Academy and this is set as on the Company Details.

To fix this

Analysis codes shows as Analysis Code1, etc

This is because you haven't set any labels for the codes you want to use. You can do this on the Analysis codes screen.


What happens when

The nominal account is saved?

The new nominal account becomes available on all nominal account drop-down lists and transactions can be posted to it.

Tip: You can't delete a nominal account once transactions have been posted to it.