JD Edwards General Accounting (G/L)

JD Edwards allows you to set up and maintain companies, business units, and accounts. Each business unit can only be associated with one company. One or more model charts of accounts are created. The whole set of accounts or portions of it can be copied to each business unit. For example, the balance sheet business unit could contain just balance sheet accounts, or you could set it up with all accounts, including P&L accounts. At month-end, you can close Accounts Receivable, Accounts Payable, and General Accounting separately.

A fiscal date pattern is attached to each company. Each company can, therefore, have a different fiscal date pattern. The Company Master includes the following types of information:

• Company Name
• Fiscal Date Pattern
• Base Currency Code
• Open Period for the General Ledger
• Open Period for Accounts Payable
• Open Period for Accounts Receivable
• Other Information

The General Accounting system allows creation and posting of journal entries from all the various modules within JD Edwards. You can also enter adjusting journal entries and generate allocation journal entries. You can choose to enter budgets as journal entries. If you have closed the year but realize you need to make an adjustment to the prior year, you can enter a prior-year journal entry with a special code, so that you do not have to re-open the accounting period from the prior year. Some companies enter statistical information into special statistical accounts to make it easier to compute allocations by head count, square footage, etc.

JD Edwards provides three types of allocation programs to help you automatically allocate costs among departments. These can be run in sequence to allow multiple layers of allocations. These same programs can be run to create budgets or forecasts. And they can be rerun multiple times in a month.

JD Edwards enables you to automatically reconcile not only bank accounts, but also the major clearing accounts: Accounts Payable Trade, Accounts Receivable Trade, Voucher Logging Suspense, and the Received-Not-Vouchered liability account. You run a program which selects the account you want to reconcile, and the system invokes the correct algorithm for the type of account to be reconciled. The system marks offsetting records with a character, such as "R" for Reconciled. The system generates a report of the open items; i.e., the small set of items that constitute the open balance in the account. Your auditors will love this!

You can enter transactions in any currency and have the system translate the transaction at a daily, weekly, or monthly exchange rate. At month-end, you can revalue different types of accounts using a separate rate table, so that certain accounts are revalued at an average rate, some at the period-end rate, etc. The results of the revaluation process are stored in a user-defined ledger type. Once the balance sheet and income statement for each company have been restated in a common currency, you can prepare consolidated reporting and analysis.

The Annual Close program can be run multiple times for each company and ledger type. For each company, the program sums the P&L accounts and enters the result in the retained earnings account for the year, without clearing the income-statement account balances. It also creates balance-forward entries for the next year in the Account Balance file. If you enter additional adjusting journal entries, you can simply rerun the program to recalculate retained earnings.

A set of about a dozen integrity reports exist to make sure: the companies are in balance, the sum of the journal entries to a given account equals the balance in the account, all batches have been posted for the month, etc. These integrity reports will help you uncover and address any discrepancies before month-end, so that you can expedite your closing cycle.