Hi,
Warning - Brain-dump follows. :)
Decide on the analysis / reporting you need from your GL first. You may already have financial reports in XL or something which would be a good start. Go down to the lowest level of detail and think about what individual accounts you would need to achieve this.
Start in XL with a 4 digit Account code column. Create a grouping system...so all accounts from 0000 to 0499 will be sales, 0500 to 999 will be Cost of Sales, 1000 to 1499 will be Admin Expenses etc etc.
Then start to create individual accounts:
0000 - Sales Hardware
0100 - Sales Software
0200 - sales Support
etc.
Review. Do you need to increase the account length to 5 digits?
When you have your Account codes determined and typed into XL, now think about adding other segments, maybe a 2 digit segment for 'Department'.
Decide on your coding for the Department segment. 01 = Operations, 02 = Sales, 03 = Admin etc.
Insert a column to the right of your accounts and call it Department. Put 01 in it for every account. Copy and paste the whole lot down, and replace with 02, same again and replace with 03 etc. (now you have an account for every department...although you will probably want to delete multiple 'Accounts Payable' accounts for example, as you will typically only want one control account).
Decide what other segments you may need. Maybe one for employees? Three digits long? Put '000' beside every account (to denote that its not employee analysed). Then find all of the employee related accounts (since not every account will be employee related) and create copies putting 001 as the third segment. do it again for 003 etc.
so - what's the whole point of this?
1. You are coding down to the lowest level of detail required. i.e. with this you can get a mini P&L for each department, or one for each employee (try in in XL by adding filters to the columns).
2. You are creating the source file for importing your chart of accounts into GP.
3. You are identifying the Account Format that you will need to set for this particular company.
If have a number of companies to consolidate - it makes it easier if they all share the same account structure / format.
Resist trying to get Payables / Receivables analysis in your GL. Leave this in the sub modules.
Resist putting in a 'Company' segment. You will know what company the account refers to by the Database ID...and Management Reporter understands this anyway.
Brain fried!!
