General Ledger options

The General Ledger tab of the Options dialog lets you maintain the account masks used for tracking intercompany transactions.

Note

Intercompany posting requires that your companies share a common company segment in the chart of accounts. The process does not pertain when companies are maintained in separate company databases.

Intercompany account masks let you define how ActivityHD generates intercompany accounts for the additional postings needed to track intercompany receivables and payables. These are not intercompany elimination entries which are needed to eliminate the profit/loss of transactions between companies in a consolidated financial statement. Instead, these are the postings which are created to track the intercompany receivables and payables amounts when one company, usually the parent company, does business on behalf of another company, usually a subsidiary.

Example

Suppose parent company "0" pays bills for subsidiary companies "1" and "2". An invoice is received for equipment and is to be distributed to both subsidiaries. The liability is posted to Company 0. The expenses are posted to Company 1 and Company 2. Intercompany postings (marked with an asterisk) are created automatically:

Account   Description   Debit   Credit    
 2000-0-A   Accounts Payable (0)       900.00    
 5048-1-A   Office Supplies (1)   200.00        
 5048-2-A   Office Supplies (2)   700.00        
*1991-0-A   Intercompany Receivables   200.00       Company 0 receivables from Company 1
*2990-1-A   Intercompany Payables       200.00   Company 1 payables to Company 0
*1992-0-A   Intercompany Receivables   700.00       Company 0 receivables from Company 2
*2990-2-A   Intercompany Payables       700.00   Company 2 payables to Company 0

Notice that Company 0's intercompany receivables (200 + 700) balance the liability posted for the invoice. Company 1's intercompany payables posting balances its expense and Company 2's intercompany payables posting balances its expense. Each company remains in balance.

For this example, you would define the following account masks:

Intercompany AR Account Mask: 199?-_-_

Intercompany AP Account Mask: 299?-_-_

The example assumes that both the Company segment (the second segment) and the Ledger segment (the third segment) require balance. The question marks in the masks are replaced with the non-ledger balancing segment(s) which, in this example, are one-digit company numbers.