General ledger - overview

The General ledger workspace is the central financial application of Visma Net, offering integration with other workspaces and giving instant access to mission-critical financial data. By using this workspace, you can monitor all transactions that are entered or automatically generated in the General ledger workspace. Each time a transaction is released in any other workspace, the information is posted to the general ledger.

The primary functionalities of the General ledger workspace are described briefly below and in detail in other topics in this section.

The chart of accounts

You can establish the system of accounts that best supports your company’s operations. The chart of accounts allows four account types: assets, liabilities (balance sheet accounts), income, and expenses (income statement accounts). The accounts can be categorised into user-defined account classes, such as petty cash and travel expenses, for convenient grouping of accounts on reports and for budgeting. Visma Net also allows you to configure and use two special system-maintained accounts: YTD net income and Retained earnings.

User-defined subaccounts

In Visma Net, you can use subaccounts with your accounts. The user-defined subaccounts reflect your operational needs, support reporting and analytical needs and enable you to keep the number of your accounts manageable. For details, see: Manage subaccounts - overview.

To use subaccounts, the Subaccounts functionality must be enabled in the Enable/disable functionalities (CS100000) window.

Flexible account and subaccount IDs

Visma Net accommodates flexible configuration of account and subaccount (if the Subaccounts functionality is enabled in your system) IDs. To make account and subaccount IDs meaningful for users of the system, you may compose the IDs of multiple segments. The total length of IDs may be up to 30 characters. For details, see: About account IDs and About subaccount IDs.

Account and subaccount security

To restrict access to sensitive accounts and subaccounts, assign them to a restriction group.

Only the users assigned to the same restriction group will have permission to work with the applicable accounts and subaccounts.

User-definable financial year and periods

A financial year is a year-long period with the start date you have specified. You can define any number of accounting periods within the financial year, and you can add a special adjustment period. Once you have defined financial periods, they will be generated for each subsequent financial year.

Flexible period-end closing procedures

Visma Net provides multiple options so that you can configure period closing procedures in accordance with your company policies. At any point in time, you can have multiple active periods. Activating a period doesn’t require closing a previous one. For details, see: About period-end closing procedures.

Batch processing and scheduling of transactions

General ledgertransactions are organised in batches. ransactions posted to the General ledger workspace can be manually entered or system-generated, posted from other workspaces, such as Supplier ledger, Customer ledger, Cash management, or Inventory. Batches with recurring transactions may be assigned to easy-to-configure schedules to be repeated periodically. Period-end adjustment transactions can generate auto-reversing batches.

Support for multiple ledgers

Visma Net supports the following types of ledgers: actual, budget, reporting, and statistical. If your company has multiple branches, each of the branches may have one actual ledger and an unlimited number of ledgers of other types.

Multi-currency support

If multi-currency support is enabled, the system will use the base currency for updating account balances, but users can enter transactions in a foreign currency. Also, you can maintain accounts denominated to foreign currencies. The system will keep the balance of such accounts in the base currency and the currency of denomination. You can define default currency exchange rate types, to make data entry easier. For details, see: About denominated accounts and About foreign currency transactions.

Trial balance import capabilities

By using Visma Net, you can import trial balance data from consolidation units for reporting, or from third-party software to initialise the system during implementation. You can export the data in.csv or.xlsx format and import the data to Visma Net, thus saving time and preventing input mistakes. For details, see: Import trial balances - overview.

Automation of allocations

With Visma Net, you can use allocation templates to automate multiple allocations. You create an allocation source by specifying a group of accounts and subaccounts, with the help of grouping masks. Visma Net lets you automatically post amounts to multiple destination accounts and distribute the source amount by percentages, quantities, and PTD or YTD balances of the destination account. For details, see: About allocation rules.

Flexible budgeting capabilities

Visma Net makes creating budgets an easy task. You can create a single budget structure that will be used by all branches and that consists of multiple levels of articles and subarticles. You can create a virtually unlimited number of budgets and budget scenarios, and you can compare budgets to other budgets or to actual data. Access to budget articles is managed by using restriction groups. For details, see: Manage budgets - overview.

General ledger consolidations

By using the General ledger workspace, you can perform various consolidation tasks. If your organisation is a consolidation unit, you can configure mapping of the accounts and subaccounts to the parent company accounts and subaccounts, as well as specify which ledgers contain consolidation data. If your organisation is a parent company, you can:

• Configure remote access to the websites of each of the consolidation units.
• Create a ledger to hold the consolidated data.
• Periodically import consolidation data from the website of each consolidation unit.
• Run consolidated reports.

For details, see: General ledger consolidation - overview and About account mapping for consolidations.

The analytical report manager

Use the analytical report manager to define and edit the analytical reports that consolidate and summarise data in meaningful ways that suit your business. To generate the reports for specific periods or to limit the volume of data displayed in the report, you can use data filters.

Audit trail

The General ledger workspace provides a full audit trail of journal transactions, along with information on the user who entered the transaction and the user who modified the record. The system does not allow any user to delete or cancel posted general ledger transactions. The only possible way to correct general ledger balances is to enter a correcting general ledger transaction with appropriate comments. The system can also be configured to keep modification history for any transaction.

Other functionalities and options

The General ledger workspace also supports the following functionalities:

• Subaccounts along with accounts in every transaction record, for in-depth analysis
• Transaction posting in summary or in detail
• Multiple options for configuring financial periods, and the possibility to define custom periods
• Extensive drill-down capabilities available for inquiries, reports, and processing windows
• Data consolidation for any number of reporting units
• Efficient data entry with many user-defined default values
• Ability to perform allocations at any period-end time