Chart of Accounts
The Chart of Accounts Maintenance window (GL> Maintenance> Chart of Accounts) is used to create and maintain individual general ledger accounts and will display journal entry history, balance amounts, budget amounts and purchase order history. GL accounts are created and maintained by fiscal year, so the Chart of Accounts Maintenance window allows you to view the GL accounts in any chart of accounts that has been created.
Create a New Fiscal Year
The Create a New Fiscal Year process (GL> Utilities> Create a New Fiscal Year) is used to copy the current chart of accounts to a new fiscal year. This process is run before you begin creating budgets for the future chart of accounts.
Budgeting
There are several different ways to generate or modify the budgets on GL accounts. After the chart of accounts has been created in a future fiscal year you can generate a budget using the following budgeting processes: Extended Budgeting, Budget Adjustments, MS Excel - Export and Import budget amounts and Edit New Year Budgets.
Fiscal Year End Reset
The Fiscal Year End Reset process will roll the balance of the revenue and expense accounts into the fund balance accounts of each fund, and roll the amounts of the adopted budget to the current budget for the new fiscal year. This process should be run after a new fiscal year chart of accounts has been created (GL> Utilities> Create New Fiscal Year), closing journal entries have been committed (GL> Journal Entries) and the fiscal year end reports have been run.
Refresh Beginning Balances
After committing a batch or journal entry in a prior fiscal year, use the Refresh Beginning Balances feature (GL> Utilities> Refresh Beginning Balances) to update the beginning balances of the fund balance accounts in the current fiscal year. The beginning balances of asset and liability general ledger accounts update automatically as transactions are posted to previous fiscal years, so this process does affect those GL accounts.
Lockout Periods
The Lockout Periods window is used to lock the general ledger so that users cannot post journal entries to past or future fiscal periods and years. The fiscal year end process in the Springbrook application is a soft close, meaning you can still post journal entries to prior fiscal periods and fiscal years after the fiscal year has been closed. The Lockout Periods feature allows you to lock fiscal periods and years so that journal entries cannot be posted to them.
Setup
The Setup window (GL> Utilities> Setup) is used to set the format of the GL account numbers, reference numbers (generally used if the format of the Chart of Accounts has changed) and sub-ledger accounts. Changes to the GL module setup will be rare.