Add Subsidiary ledgers in for Accounts in the P&L

Please extend the subsidiary ledger feature in the balance sheet to the Profit and loss accounts.
This feature is needed for the following reasons.

1.Will bring consistency to the Manager program. Many first users I have introduced to Manager get surprised when they don’t find this very useful feature in the chart of accounts for Profit and loss accounts.

  1. Will help to reduce the accounts showing in the summary page. This will be handy for users who want to look at totals quickly.

  2. For NGOs donors now require their reports to be consistent with the general ledger of the donee. This means adding new accounts anytime you have a new contract or new donor. I have met many NGOs who are facing this problem. Problem is that, they come to have a long list accounts in their profit and loss reports.

  3. Reduces accounts which are displayed when selecting accounts for data entry.

Thanks

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Why each donor needs separate P/L account? Is this the only use-case for this feature?

Let me clarify, the donors don’t need a separate profit and loss, they require accounts or activity codes as they call it to be incorporated into the general ledger of the donee. Separate profit and loss is cared for by tracking codes. With subsidiary ledgers, all profit and loss accounts for that donor will be created under one account thereby reducing the number of accounts displayed in the summary and reports.

Other uses include putting all related accounts under one parent account. For example, a parent account can be named Insurance Cost and under the insurance cost account we may have Motor Vehicle Insurance, Building Insurance, other insurance cost. We may also have Personnel Cost and have all personnel related cost as subsidiaries to the parent Account.

I think this would better be solved by simply adding option to Summary tab or reports to show accounts only up to XY level. This way it’s OK for chart of accounts be long if necessary. Reports could be shown in compact way up to XY levels. Thoughts?

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@lubos Instead of filtering by level it would be better to have a specific flag. Not always what I want to see at level 3 of a particular branch is what I want to see in another one.

That would be okay provided we can drill down on the parent account and see the balances of the subsidiary accounts just like how we drill down on custom control accounts.

Dear Lubos:

As Abeiku has suggested. Subsidiary ledgers account in P&L would be very useful for not only NGO but other business organisation who want to control their expense in detail under each Main Account Head.

Adding Subsidiary ledger for P&L would make Manager Software more powerful to users

Hopping that, this feature will be added soon.

The latest version (19.7.53) is adding new field Groups to Collapse to Profit & Loss Statement and Balance Sheet. This will allow you to select groups which you’d like to collapse (thus hiding details within the group).

As per @Davide suggestion I think this is better than just specifying number of levels as I originally thought as this allows for greater flexibility and is more intuitive.

Great step forward. Thanks @lubos. There seems to be a little bug. It seems that after the update the system shows up “inventory on hand”, “special accounts” and so on under balance sheets even if all the accounts were assigned to a specific control accounts. Can you please fix it? Thanks

Can you illustrate what you mean?

Once, if you linked all the inventory items to specific control accounts, “inventory on hand” account disappeared under assets. It all of sudden reappeared. And also appeared a “special account” account under assets

Same issue for capital accounts in the equity section. The problem spreads around all control accounts.

I also suggest that the selectable collapsible groups should be listed in the same order like shown in the chart of accounts and not in alphabetical order.

Great to know there is progress, I will try this soon and give a comment.

I love it. the only a bit odd in terms of presentation. the collapsed group account wasn’t in bold format. Plus I have been wanted to ask for a long time. why group account doesn’t show account numbering?

I think it’s correct to have the collapsed group not in bold since it became a leaf of the tree. There are some bugs still to be fixed by @lubos.

collapse not%20collapse

I presumed the scenario for current behavior it is expected the underlying accounts are not meant for public view?

I would still prefer to have it as bold to differentiate between group account and non group account.

Correct. It’s a matter of preference and use. Maybe it can be made optional with a flag.

BTW I see that we are also missing also the “less” tag. I didn’t notice this bug because I prefer to use values with signs.

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The latest version (19.7.60) is fixing the missing Less: prefix and is smarter when it comes to using bold text. Basically if the level contains one or more groups which are expanded, then the entire level will be bold.

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Thank you @Lubos. Now is a proper feature.

Thanks. How about the problem with the control accounts?