General Ledger

SunSystems Financials provides three financial report writers: Financial Analysis, Financial Statements and Financial Tables. Each offers a variety of features that assist you in preparing financial reports.
Financial Analysis (FA) is a quick and easy to use report writer. It provides an analysis or view of Financials information, selected and sorted to your specification. It allows you to list transactions included in your system and is used primarily for internal reporting.
Financial Statements (FS) provides you with more control over the presentation and content of your report. It is used mainly to present management information such as profit and loss, balance sheet, and similar reports.
Financial Tables (FT) is similar to the Financial Statements report writer in that you have a high degree of control over the presentation of information on a report. However, it has the additional feature of allowing more flexibility in specifying the contents of the columns on a report. A Financial Table can be likened to a matrix.
Note: These report writers can only include data held in Financials. They should not be confused with the powerful SunSystems Report Writer facility that allows you to produce reports from any system, in any format.

Ledger Revaluation (LR) revalues one currency against another currency on a group of transactions. For the revalued currency, it calculates the difference between the original and revalued amount on each transaction. This revaluation difference may be:

an unrealized currency gain or loss resulting from a fluctuation in the exchange rate, or a balancing adjustment reflecting a rounding difference.

Ledger Revaluation allows you to revalue selected currency transactions using the current period exchange rate, to calculate the unrealized currency gain or loss or a currency balancing adjustment.
For example, you can recalculate the base currency values from the transaction currency values, for all of your debtor account transactions. In this example the transaction currency value is the source of the revaluation, and the base currency is the target.
You can revalue different combinations of currencies depending on your pivot currency, your business unit setup and the source and target currencies you specify. You can identify the transactions to be included in a revaluation precisely using the selection criteria available.
Ledger Revaluation can post revaluation transactions to the ledger to reflect the difference in your accounts, or simply report on the differences. The revaluation differences may be a currency gain or loss, or a currency balancing adjustment. These differences can be posted individually, or they can be consolidated.

SunSystems budgeting allows you to hold budget values against accounts and analysis codes. These budget values can be used in two different ways in the system:
to control expenditure and warn if any transactions exceed the budget available
to provide comparative values for actual/budget/forecast reports and inquiries.
You can apply the SunSystems Budget Checking facility to transactions as they enter the system. There are two types of budget checking available, depending on the SunSystems modules you are using:

Expenditure Checking
Over expenditure checking monitors actual expenditure against budget, for accounts you select in SunSystems Financials. As you enter ledger transactions for accounts or they are posted using Ledger Import, it checks the total actual expenditure against the allocated budget and warns if a transaction takes an account over its budget.
Using expenditure checking, the available budget is calculated as follows:

Budget - Actual expenditure

A warning appears if the transaction amount exceeds this available budget amount.
Commitment Checking
Commitment checking is only available if you are using the Purchasing module in SunSystems Order Fulfilment and SunSystems Financials. Committed expenditure is the total of any outstanding purchase orders raised for the account and represents the amount you are committed to spend for the account.
Over commitment checking is used to check purchase orders are they are entered into Order Fulfilment Purchasing, to prevent orders being raised that would exceed the budget available. It can also be used in Ledger Entry and Ledger Import to check ledger transactions, if the transactions are entered against budget accounts for which commitment checking has been requested.
Using commitment checking, the available budget is calculated as follows:

Budget - Actual expenditure - Committed expenditure

A warning appears if the transaction amount exceeds this available budget amount.

A journal is used to post a number of ledger transactions to the accounts in Financials. In its simplest form, a single ledger transaction posts either a debit or credit amount to a selected account, in an accounting period.
Note: The transaction value can be held in up to three different currencies: base currency, transaction currency, second base or reporting currency. The transaction can also contain a memo value.
A journal is used to post different types of transaction: sales invoices, purchase invoices, cash receipts, cash payments, expenses, asset or liability movements, depreciation, to name but a few.
Double Entry Journals
SunSystems Financials ensures that your ledger remains in balance at all times. It does this by ensuring that every journal balances. For a journal to balance, the total of the debit transaction amounts for an accounting period must equal the total of the credit transaction amounts for the same period.
This means that a journal must contain at least two ledger transactions.
In a multi-currency environment, up to three currency values can be entered on each journal transaction. The base currency values must always balance before a journal can be posted. The business unit posting rules determine which of the other currency values must also balance.
SunSystems can force a journal to balance by automatically posting a balancing amount to a selected account. See When is a Journal In Balance?.
Note: Transactions posted to memo accounts do not have to balance.

A budget ledger refers to a completely separate set of transactions that are used to hold another set of values, for example budget values or commitment values.
You can define several different budget ledgers for a business unit, depending on the number of budgets you want to maintain. For example, in any financial year you may need to maintain budget ledgers for: