Flexi Levels - Account Grouping and Sorting
A chart of accounts (COA) is a created list of the accounts used by an organization to define each class of items for which money or its equivalent is spent or received. Wilkipedia
When reporting on the activities of a business you may wish to see high level summary reports along with further detail level reports. So it's useful to collapse a number of accounts into one group or header level and sort these depending upon your need.
Most accounting products 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 is defined. Changing this later is painful.
Bi4Cloud provides functionality to read existing GL account levels and then allows you to:
- Define you own Report Levels/Groups - Flexi Levels
- Group 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 Codes (Xero)
and all of these features are implemented using a simple drag and drop user interface.
The program allows the definition of up to 4 levels and arrangement of accounts and sub-levels with a completely flexible mix and match of groups and levels.
This grouping and sorting feature is available from the menu option GL Group and Sort from the Cool Stuff version by clicking on the Cool Stuff button on the admin page.
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 account levels and hierarchy that already exist. 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
Right clicking on a group displays an Option Box to allow you to create 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.
Next left click to drag it to the position you need.
The newly created group element can be moved to either change the sort position it appears in, or drop it into another group. Left click on your mouse and drag the element. 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.
Below see the Insert icon graphic this inserts the element between other groups.
Below see the + icon graphic (plus sign) this adds the element to (or under) the highlighted group.
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 - Currently this group and sort feature is a Beta release so to minimise your frustration PLEASE press Save button after every few actions to save your work
What does this look like in reports ?
Below is the output of the Bi4 Profit and Loss report with the Analyse By dimension set to GL Flexi Level 1 and highlighted in orange is the new General Expense group that was defined as Level 1.
In our second example we change the Analyse By to GL Flexi Level 2 and this shows the combined Travel group in orange that was defined as a Level 2 group with other Level 2 Accounts / Groups.
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 dimensions or any of three (3) sub-total dimensions.
As with all Bi4Cloud reports these can be saved as favourites for later recall, shared with other users or automatically emailed at user defined periods providing more automation, better consistency and repeatability than spreadsheet methods.