Accounting

Accounting is the general ledger. With accounting turned on, every posted delivery invoice, supplier bill, payment, credit memo, stock count and depreciation run writes a balanced journal entry here, so the bookkeeper can close each month and run the financial statements without re-keying anything.

How to turn accounting on or off when setting up the company

Open Settings, then Accounting, and use the General Ledger switch. A new company starts with accounting enabled: every posting writes journal entries and updates the ledger. When it is disabled, deliveries, receipts and invoices still work and quantities still move, but no journal entries are written and invoices are settled by marking them paid.

Opening Accounting takes you to Reporting when accounting is on, and to Chart of Accounts when it is off.

How to find your way around Accounting when you open the sidebar

How to set up the chart of accounts when you start

1. Open Chart of Accounts. Accounts sit in groups; each has an Account Number, a Name, a Class and an Account Type, and belongs to either the income statement or the balance sheet.
2. Use Add Group and Add Account to build the list, and Move to Group to move an account under a different group. Only accounts (not groups) can receive postings.
3. Open any account to see its ledger: the opening balance, the net change and the closing balance, with every line that posted to it.
4. To bring over balances from your old books, switch to Opening Balances, choose the As of date, enter each account's balance, and choose Post opening balances.

How to tell AimRack which accounts to post to when you configure the company

Default Accounts lists the accounts every automatic posting uses: Receivables and Payables, Sales and Shipping Revenue, Sales Tax Payable, Cost of Goods Sold, Inventory Adjustment, the customer and supplier payment discount accounts, the customer write-off (bad debt) account, depreciation and accumulated depreciation, and the rest. Set each once; there are no per-item posting groups. Export CSV downloads the list.

How to set payment terms when customers pay on different schedules

Open Payment Terms and add one per schedule you offer. Each has a Name, a Calculation Method (Net, End of Month, or Day of Month), the days until the payment is due, and an optional early-payment discount: the discount percent and the days within which it applies. A typical propane company uses Net 15 for households and Net 30 for businesses. The term on an invoice sets its due date, and its discount window is what a payment's Discount column honours.

How to close a month when the bookkeeping for it is done

A month is an accounting period, and it moves one way: Open, then Locked, then Closed.

1. Before the fiscal year starts, open Accounting Periods and choose Generate Fiscal Year to create its twelve monthly periods. Nothing posts into a month until its fiscal year has been generated: the fiscal year you are in and the next one are created with the company, and any other year is generated here. Its preview lists the twelve months with their dates and marks any month that already exists, which is left as it is. Accounting Periods lists the months grouped by fiscal year, marks the month containing the company's today as Current, and says beside each state what it takes: an open month takes everything, a locked month adjustments only, a closed month nothing.
2. When the month's deliveries and bills are all entered, open the period. Its checklist runs these checks for you:
   • documents still waiting to post into the month (must be fixed);
   • draft journal entries dated in the month (must be fixed);
   • posted journal entries whose debits and credits do not match (must be fixed);
   • postings not yet delivered to Rillet, when it is connected (must be fixed);
   • draft depreciation runs ending in the month (a warning);
   • unmatched intercompany transactions (a warning).
3. Choose Lock Period. A locked month refuses deliveries, receipts, invoices and payments dated in it, but still accepts manual journal entries, so the bookkeeper can post adjustments while operations have moved on.
4. Review the balance sheet and income statement for the month, and mark that task done with Mark Done.
5. Choose Close Period. A closed month accepts nothing, and its balances are saved for fast reporting.

A warning can be skipped with Skip, which asks for a reason; a check that must be fixed cannot be skipped. Months close in order: an earlier month must be closed first. A locked month can be returned to Open with Unlock. A closed month is final on these pages: no page offers to reopen it, so lock and review before you close. Only an empty, open month can be deleted.

How to slice the numbers when the plain accounts are not enough

• Dimensions tag each journal line with things like location, department, cost center, customer, customer type, item, employee or project, plus custom dimensions you define. A branch or bulk plant set up as a location lets you report sales by branch without a separate set of accounts.
• Cost Centers and Projects are lists you tag lines with.
• Exchange Rates hold currency rates for companies that buy or sell in more than one currency.

How to handle trades between two of your companies when you own more than one

Intercompany appears once your company group has more than one company. A sale from one company to another is recorded automatically when the invoice posts; New IC Transaction records one by hand. Run Matching pairs each company's side of the same trade (Unmatched becomes Matched), and Generate Eliminations writes the entries that remove matched pairs from the consolidated statements (Matched becomes Eliminated), so the money is not counted twice.

Where this fits

Every operational page feeds the ledger: sales invoices, purchase invoices, payments, credits, receipts and inventory counts. The results are read in Reports, corrected with journal entries, and extended with fixed assets.