Flexi Levels - Account Grouping and Sorting
BI4Cloud Flexi Levels allows you to reorganise, sumarise and streamline your Chart of Accounts (COA) independently of how it may have been setup in you accounting system e.g. Xero, QBO, MYOB or Acumatica.
This article will guide you through:
When and Why to use Flexi Levels
When reporting on the activities of a business it is great to be able to see high level summary reports along with more detail level reports. So it's useful to be able to collapse a number of accounts into one group or header level and sort these depending upon your reporting needs.
Most accounting packages have GL account headers and sub-accounts or may have account levels, however these are usually fixed and users need to decide on the level of summary or detail at the time the Chart of Accounts (COA) is defined. Changing this COA later is often very difficult.
Bi4Cloud Flexi Levels allows you to create a new flexible GL COA account structure where you can:
- Define you own COA Report Levels/Groups - Flexi Levels
- Group GL accounts and levels into these new report Flexi Levels
- Determine and control the sorting position on the report of that Flexi Level
- Use together with Jobs (MYOB), Class (QuickBooks) or Tracking Categories (Xero)
How to setup new Flexi Levels
All of these features are implemented using a simple drag and drop user interface.
Flexi Levels is available in the Cool Stuff (Enterprise 5 user) version of BI4Cloud from the menu option GL Group and Sort.
Up to 4 levels can be setup with the arrangement of sub-levels and accounts that is completely flexible.
In the current release this feature works best in Google Chrome
The first time this is run the existing chart of accounts is read and analysed for any existing account levels and hierarchy. By default the program will put accounts into groups based upon account types:
- 1 Assets
- 2 Liabilities
- 3 Equity
- 4 Income
- 5 Cost of Sales
- 6 Expenses
- 8 Other income
- 9 Other Expense
and it will display something like this depending upon your accounting software. More Details
Clicking on an arrow expands the level to see the Accounts below.
Right clicking on a group displays an Option Box to allow you to create a new Group Header as either a:
- Top Level Group or a
- Child of the current item
The newly added group will appear at the end of the list
In our example we added a Top Level Group called General Expenses.
Note that Flexi Levels only have names and no account numbers.
Next left click to drag it to the position you need.
The newly created group (General Expenses) can be moved to either change the sort position it appears in, or drop it under another group. Left click on your mouse and drag it to the desired position. The highlighted box that follows the mouse pointer will show an icon graphic of a plus sign or an insertion icon to indicate the proposed action if you release the mouse button.
The Insert icon indicates it will insert the new group between other groups, see below.
The + icon graphic (plus sign) indicates it will add the new group to (or under) the highlighted group, see below:
To see more details about any displayed Group or Account you can left click on the item and a blue dialog displays name, source and level information. The sample below shows information about an account.
and this screen shows the message for a User Defined group.
The following screens show how to create a Child Group Travel under 6 - Expenses and then dragging Travel - International and Travel - National accounts into it.
First create the Child Group Travel by selecting Add Child Group
The child group Travel is created as a Level 2 Group
and the two Travel accounts are then dragged, one at a time, into the Travel group
WARNING - Moving and grouping accounts can be tricky and if you forget to save you can loose your changes PLEASE press Save button after every few actions to save your work
Using Flexi Levels in reports
Below is the output of the Bi4 Profit and Loss report with the Analyse By dimension set to GL Flexi Level 2 and highlighted in red.
The above examples have been kept simple for clarity to show the created groups however any of the defined Report Levels can participate in reports as an Analyse dimension (used to setup report rows) or any of three (3) sub-total dimensions.
As with all Bi4Cloud reports these can be saved, shared with other users or automatically emailed at user defined periods providing more automation, better consistency and repeatability than spreadsheet methods.