Ledger & Banking Features Overview

Overview

This article describes the functions and capabilities of Accounting Seed's General Ledger and Banking feature sets. For more information, visit the General Ledger section of this knowledge base. 

Journal Entries

Journal Entries are used in Accounting to make adjustments or record items that do not originate from any of the source objects in Accounting Seed. A common example is a payroll Journal Entry.

• Journal Entries can be created and posted later to allow for an approval process to happen, or created and posted all in one step.
• Accounting Periods can be batch opened and closed.
• If you create a Journal Entry and select the AR Control GL Account, a Customer (Account) must also be selected. If you select the AP Control GL Account, either a Vendor (Account), Contact, or User must also be selected. 

Multi-Company

Multi-Company allows an organization to track financials for more than one legal entity in a single Salesforce/Accounting Seed instance. 

• Allows businesses to track multiple companies in a single Salesforce instance, provided all the companies have the same:
• Fiscal year end
• Chart of Accounts
• Supports multiple legal entities in a single Salesforce instance with different base currencies (i.e. Multinationals).

Multi-Currency

For businesses that need to invoice customers or pay vendors in other currencies than their own, they will want to elect to use Accounting Seed’s multi-currency functionality, which includes the following:

Note: Accounting Seed uses Salesforce currencies to support this feature. Customers must also elect to use Salesforce advanced currency management for dated exchange rates functionality to use this feature.

• Enables an organization to invoice customers and receive payment in any foreign currency.
• Enables vendors to be entered and paid in any foreign currency.
• Automatically tracks any 'realized gains or losses' due to fluctuations in currency exchange rates. The Ledger tracks both the foreign amount and the converted amount of all foreign currency transactions.
• Bank Deposits and Bank Reconciliations can be processed in foreign currencies. All standard Financial reports can be run on the Ledger's Currency.

For businesses that use Foreign Currency Translation, they will also want to elect to use Accounting Seed’s multi-currency. At Accounting Seed, an Exchange Rate tab is used to create exchange rates for Foreign Currency Translation. Using those rates, Foreign Currency Translation is an automatic background process that runs as part of Consolidations. Once the process is complete, Financial Reports can be generated in the base currency of the Ledger, as well as in the Reporting currency (parent currency).

Fixed Assets

Accounting Seed provides the ability to set up a Fixed Asset and track data on its useful life. Examples like company trucks or machinery are good candidates for Fixed Asset items.

• An automatic function exists, which allows you to set up a series of entries to depreciate the asset over months in the future
• Accounting Seed supports straight-line depreciation.

Budget Entry

Accounting Seed’s transactional data is stored in a Ledger called Actual. You can create any number of additional Ledgers to track Budget data.

• High-level budget data can be uploaded into Accounting Seed to be used in comparison to actual data in a Financial Statement.  
• Budget to Actual view is pre-configured as part of the Financial Reporter.
• This data is populated as records into the Financial Cube object related to a Budget Ledger, so it needs to be aggregate data by the Accounting Period, GL Account, and GL Variables.
• Project Budget data can also be tracked, however, this is tracked in the Project Accounting set of functionality on the Project Task object. Project Budget data cannot be reported on with the Financial Statement tool, but rather in a Salesforce report.

Consolidations

Consolidations allow you to combine the assets, liabilities and financial data from two or more legal entities into one. The Consolidations process begins with identifying existing Transactional Ledgers to be consolidated. In Accounting Seed. New Ledgers can be created for Consolidations-Transactional and/or Consolidations-Budget Ledgers. 

• With the Consolidations Ledger(s) created, a Ledger Hierarchy tree can be created from the Set up Consolidations screen. 
• Additional Ledgers can be added to the hierarchy tree to build a desired Consolidations structure. 
• As part of the creation of a new Consolidations Ledger, an Eliminations Ledger is automatically created, which can be used to post elimination entries. 
• With all of the entries posted, including elimination entries, the Accounting Period can be closed. In Accounting Seed, as part of the period closing process, Financial Cubes are created for Transactional Ledgers and also for Eliminations Ledgers. 
• After an Accounting Period has been closed, the Run Consolidations routine can be performed, which pulls data from Transactional Financial Cubes and Eliminations Financial Cubes into the Consolidations Financial Cubes. This data will be available in the Consolidations Ledger(s) for running financial reports.
• Once the Run Consolidations routine has been completed, Standard Financial Reports and/or Custom Financial Reports can be run on Consolidations Ledgers and/or Eliminations Ledgers.

Financial Reporting

Accounting Seed has three reporting tools: Financial Reporter, Management Reporter, and Dashboards.

• The Financial Reporter includes the following list of standard reports. All of the reports have drill-down to transaction level and can be exported to Excel or to a PDF file. 
  • Profit and Loss
  • Profit and Loss Versus Budget
  • Balance Sheet
  • Trial Balance
  • Cash Flow Statement
• The Financial Reporter also includes the capability to create custom reports with your own rows, columns and calculation. Custom reports also support drill-down
• The Management reporting tool provides transactional reports throughout the application. It has a drop and drag interface and supports charting and drill-down as well. About 30 management reports come built for you when you start a new instance. Management reports can be scheduled automatically for email distribution
• Accounting Seed includes flexible drag and drop Dashboards. A sample Dashboard is included with new instances. Dashboards also have drill-down to transaction level data.

Bank Deposits

A collection of Cash Receipts and Debit Journal Entry Lines (often used to record bank fees/refunds) can be associated together to form a Bank Deposit record.

• Bank Deposits allow you to record the amount of money deposited at one time and makes doing Bank Reconciliations much easier.

Bank Reconciliations

A Bank Reconciliation is a tool to make sure that all deposits (Cash Receipts or Bank Deposits), withdrawals (Cash Disbursements), and adjustments (Journal Entry Lines) are recorded in Accounting Seed and show up on your General Ledger.

• Accounting Seed’s Bank Reconciliation is done for a specific Bank/Credit Card Account (GL Account) and a specific date range. It does not have to be done for a month, although that is a common practice.
• Bank Reconciliation reports can be printed once the Bank Reconciliation is complete to show all cleared and uncleared transactions for audit and follow up.

Bank Direct Connect

The Bank Direct Connect (BDC) tool is an integration using a third party bank aggregation service that allows you to pull transaction history from a connected bank or credit card account directly into Accounting Seed.

• The Bank Direct Connect tool is connected to over 14,500 financial institutions. If a customer’s bank is not supported by this service, Accounting Seed provides the Financial File Import wizard with very similar functionality.
• All of the features for the Bank Direct Connect tool are in one centralized location, including the Bank Settings, Bank Transactions, Bank Rules, and Financial File Import.
• Downloaded Bank Transaction records are automatically created within Salesforce. Therefore, you do not have to reconnect to a bank each time you need to review transactions.
• Bank Rules allow you to control how to auto-populate fields on source records created from BDC through user-defined rules.
• Bank Direct Connect allows you to automatically add or match Bank Transactions to source records.
• The Financial File Import wizard provides the ability to import foreign Bank Transactions. Source records created from foreign Bank Transactions or matched to them will be in the same currency as the foreign Bank Transactions, while the GL Transactions created from the source records will be converted into the currency of the Ledger.
• Bank Direct Connect can create a Cash Receipt, a Cash Disbursement, a Debit Journal Entry, or a Credit Journal Entry. These records can be assigned to Customers, Vendors, GL Accounts, GL Variables, Projects, and Project Tasks at the time of entry making data entry of electronic transactions very easy.