Your nominal account structure underpins your entire system and are fundamental to the successful management of your finances, so it is vitally important to configure this correctly.
Decisions to make about your nominal accounts
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What code or numbering structure do you want to use?
Each nominal account must have a unique code or number. This can be up to eight characters.
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How are you going to group your nominal accounts?
This is to make sure they are reported correctly on your financial statements.
Sage 200 uses Report categories to determine which accounts are for the Balance Sheet or Profit and Loss.
Sage 200 uses Report categories to determine which accounts are for the Balance Sheet, or Income and Expenditure reports. If you're an Academy, Sage 200 uses SOFA categories to determine which accounts are included on the SOFA report.
We have provided a predefined set of report categories
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Do you want to use cost centres or departments?
Use these to divide your nominal accounts into segments and subdivisions that reflect your company's structure.
You append a cost centre and/ or department to profit and loss nominal accounts. Each nominal account has the same Code but different cost centres.
If you want to use these you'll need to create them before setting up nominal accounts.
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Which cost centres do you want to use?
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
We've created some cost centres for common funds used by most schools. You can use these or create your own.
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Which departments do you want to use?
Departments are used to subdivide nominal accounts so you report on income and expenditure for each department in your school. We've created some departments for common to most schools, depending on your school type. You can use or change these as required.
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Which of your nominal accounts are to act as defaults?
Your default nominal accounts are used for transactions automatically generated by Sage 200. You need to specify which accounts to use for these defaults before you start entering transactions into Sage 200.
Process for setting up nominal accounts
NominalBudgetsReport
Get started with the chart of accounts we supply
Sets up a Chart of Accounts typical to most businesses. A quick way to create nominal accounts is to use these and edit them to suit your business.
- Click Use a set of nominal accounts provided by us. The nominal accounts are shown in the list.
- You can change the Name, CC, Dept or Report Category.
This gives you a sample of a Chart of Accounts that you can use to get you started. You add more accounts now once you've completed the configuration assistant.
- Check you selected Academy on the Company Details panel.
- Click Use a set of nominal accounts provided by us. The accounts are displayed in the list. You can make changes as required or import additional accounts. You can change the Name, CC, Dept or Report Category or SOFA category.
Tips for creating your chart of accounts
- If you have a large number of nominal accounts or a chart of accounts that you're using in an existing system, consider importing these into Sage 200. This will save time and makes sure your nominal structure in Sage 200 is the same as your previous system.
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Use the predefined set of Report Categories where possible.
Default layouts for the Profit and Loss, Balance sheet
- If you don't intend to use the nominal account structure from previous system, consider using the set of nominal accounts we have provided for you. You can change the description of each account to something more suitable to your business, although you can't change the code. You can add new accounts where required.
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If you want capture additional information specific to your organisation or add custom fields, you add analysis codes to your nominal accounts. Once set up, you can report and examine specific areas of your business.
If you want to use analysis codes, set them up and add them to your accounts after you have completed the configuration assistant. See Using analysis codes with nominal accounts.
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