General Ledger Report

Dear @lubos,The accounting regulating body in my country has certain standards for auditors for Auditing Financial Statements

  1. One is to have on record the reporting entities General Ledgers, the GL like the General Ledger Summary in Manager.
  2. The other is the General Ledger Transactions on record

My former Organisation used Tally ERP which simply produces these reports.

My current Organisation was using QuickBooks which gives the General Ledger Transactions Report easily with opening and closing balances but doesn’t have a report like the General Ledger summary (don’t know if they have now).

In April 2018, I convinced the board of my current Organisation to shift to using Manager for accountancy and told them of all the benefits, the best being that the desktop user edition is free. I had not really looked at the General Ledger report.

The year is ending and work with the external auditors have begun. They have made it clear to me how they want their General Ledger Transaction reports. They do not want control accounts transactions combined like it is in Manager now. They also want the GL transactions to have opening and closing balances which agrees with the General Ledger Summary.

Looking at the volume of transactions and control accounts in our COA I fear there will be a lot of work on me. Per the standards of the auditors, every account must have it opening balance, transactions and closing balance to enable easy lookup or scrutiny of transactions. This affects account under account payable, bank accounts, cash accounts, fixed asset, all control accounts.

I have explained further in the photo below

Thanks

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Like this I guess

images

Actually there is a need for this change as many user also requested this and this is very useful while preparing financials.

@lubos if you could make this change, it would be really helpful as most of the country follows a standard format which also has opening as well as closing balance.

Thanks & Regards.

yes @lubos , its needed , general leger Transaction report with opening and closing balance is very useful ,
and every day i check if you realease our request :grin:

Dear @Lubos, this is a follow up on your response to this topic. The year is coming to a close and actually i’m in an anxiety state over the fact that our auditors won’t accept the general ledger transaction report manager currently gives.

As for showing general ledger transaction details of control accounts in the manner I suggested in this topic (showing balances of all accounts in the control accounts separately before summing their balances) you can ignore that for now, I have a temporal solution.
Even though it will be a lot of work and will make my balance sheet very long, I will create control accounts for all the account I want a separate transaction list for. So, for example, I will create 12 control account made of bank account for our 12 bank accounts we have in order to avoid all their transaction list added up to one list under the Bank Accounts control account.

Please concentrate rather on bringing opening balances of accounts in the general ledger transactions and consequently a closing balance that will match the balances the general ledger summary shows (opening and closing balances). Our auditor will need that. I convinced the board to Accept manager.io and dump Quickbooks ( I didn’t know the importance of that report to our auditors)

It sad anyway that the balances of accounts are separated in the balance sheet (for example employee control account in the balance sheet when clicked will show balances to be paid to individual employees but not a list of all the transactions of employees) but not in General Ledger. Consistency is what i seek.

@lubos please do it !

The program is consistent, @Abeiku. For all control accounts, the first level drill-down shows balances of subsidiary ledgers. From there, drilling down again shows transactions. For ordinary accounts, because there are no subsidiary ledgers, the first step is bypassed and the drill-down goes directly to transactions. If drill-downs always went directly to transactions, the results would be so jumbled you would have a hard time finding anything. You have been using Manager for long enough that you might remember when this was the case. The current approach was a big improvement, in my opinion. Whether you agree or not, it is consistent.

@Tut I think you didn’t understand me. Please take s look at the picture I posted in the first post.

If you look at the GL transactions report right now, transactions for subsidiary accounts for a control account are all listed together. What I was requesting was for Manager to group these transactions according to their subsidiary accounts.

Remember auditors and tax authorities who want to do an Audit on your financial statement will not be given your company accounting software data. The practice is to give then your GL transactions and GL summary and Financial reports (P&L, BS and CFS) in a printout out or locked spread sheet…

If you need to make changes they promt you to do the corrections. If you have engaged auditors to do your final accounts, they will also do their journal entries and give you a copy for you to update your records through your accounting software.

The current report makes it hard to confirm balances of subsidiary accounts. One can easily correct all that by putting every subsidiary account into their own control account (so subsidiary account for customers, for suppliers, for banks, for all special accounts etc) if you really need their transaction separated in the GL transactions report. It not easy but there is no choice.
If I do not get these features ( balances of accounts and separated transactions list), I will have to export my long accounting data (GL) onto a spread sheet and add all things to make the report usable for the auditors. Problem is that, if I make any corrections, I will have to enter it in the App and also the GL export.

@Abeiku, I understood your original request, both when first presented and when repeated in post #4. My response was directed toward the last paragraph of post #4, and especially the portion in parentheses. There, you seemed to be saying Manager behaved inconsistently for control accounts and ordinary accounts. The point I was making was that the program is consistent, just not what you prefer.

I’m not sure your suggestion would be workable for the broader Manager community. In your case, a few programs might be broken out for separate display. Or a dozen bank accounts. But that would be practical for 2,000 customer subaccounts under Accounts receivable?

One thing is ironic. Your auditors seem to want a computer accounting program to produce the equivalent of an antiquated handwritten ledger. And they want to look at paper reports instead of delving into the software. My experience has been that auditors demand access to original data in the form it was first entered so they can trace it through the system. The general ledger report you describe, or locked spreadsheets, could easily be forged to hide malicious activity.

Sure I’m having a lot of suppliers myself. But do I have a choice in my situation? There are users who may have fewer suppliers who may choose my path if the work wouldn’t be too much.

I have already worked with the auditors for the preparation of 2017 audited financial statement. I started working here in March and had to complete the work of the previous accountant. And they require these reports. In my country the accounting regulating body here requires auditors to have this record from their client. No one cares about your accounting software, they want to see your GL summary and your GL transactions that was used for the published financial statement.
They trace transactions to the hard copies, bank statements , contracts documents, etc using the GL transactions report shared with them and not through the accounting app, the apps function is to produce the GL and that it. The app is for the organization, the GL is for all parties interested in Auditing you (tax people, gorvenment, donors, potential buyers etc) that is why all accounts must be shown clearly. Accouting data from the software may also contain things a company may not want to share, e.g. records of employees, or customers or share holders which are kept in the app.

You work very hard to keep the forum running but some of these feature requests are better left for @lubos to answer. Most of the features I request here are basic features in the accounting software market.

In my previous organization where accounting data was bigger we used a paid Tally ERP 9 deployed on company server and the GL reports style im asking for and more was available that why I never requested for this. I used Manager then for store/inventory management.

It would be appropriated if we have this feature. We have the same issue.

In our country external auditors request a GL transactions summary and details. Based on this. Samples will be requested.

Doing this by excel need a lot of time to finish we are not expert in excel. Once we done the GL preperation we have to check and match our work result with the system balance it is hardly will get it right from first time

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@Lubos please when are you going to implement this very important feature, or give an assurance of consideration at least. It is clear that the innovation in improved custom reports isn’t solving this challenge. So please come up with a solution to this (if possible). Thank you.

I’m still working on custom reports. I think custom reports will be able to give you a report which will include opening balances. If not, then I will extend General Ledger Transactions report to offer this feature.

So there is going to be a solution either way.

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Great to hear this. If I could choose, i would choose extending General ledger report. But I’m aware the custom report will be developed to serve users with all their reporting needs so paying more attention to enable us all what get what we want is also good. I leave it in your hands boss.

Thank man.

I am very glad to hear this news !

I think the general ledger report is sufficient for my purposes, with the exception of one thing, the transaction descriptions – which I will get to in a second.

For the opening balances, I just feed the data into a pivot table and group prior years transaction and bingo.

My issue with the transaction description is the following: There is not a fixed format that I can use to split into columns. There is a separator " — " which is very handy but there isn’t a fixed standard for the order of data: the date comes first, then may be transaction type and # or maybe a text description like in Foreign exchange differences.

What I need is a fixed order and in case some data is missing, i still need a blank followed by the separator so I can organise the data in a more useful format.

Thanks

I agree but it should be optional. Actual format Vs multicolumn format. The actual is very useful and compact for printing.

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