our external audit requested a Detailed Trail Balance where all the accounts should appear instead of the control account total or group account total. in order to do this request it is done manually in excel sheet. such as all the account under cash on hand , cash at bank, accounts receivable, accounts payable and other control or group account should appear in the report.
we would like to know if this request could be achieved by the system. if not is it possible to add it in the ideas group
The report you are looking for is trial balance/general ledger transaction reports. How detail they are it’s up to you and how you created the chart of accounts.
This is a very unusual request. The purpose of a trial balance is to initially make sure credits and debits balance. The trial balance itself is not a customary financial report. Surely your auditor is not suggesting, for example, that your balance sheet should be broken down to the level of individual customers and suppliers. Yet that is the implication of breaking down control accounts like Accounts receivable and Accounts payable.
All that information is readily available in Manager by exporting various reports and lists if backup for the trial balance is needed. But what would a more detailed report prove if the classic form already available from Manager balances?
Don’t forget that every figure on the trial balance is clickable. Give the auditor access to the program and she or he can dive as deep as desired. If the auditor is unwilling to actually examine your accounting system in its native form, it isn’t much of an audit anyway. Any printed report could easily be faked.
I went through the GL Summary and Transaction. but that report will not give me the transaction movement for each sub account. it will only give me the GL account summary.
this common practice in Saudi Arabia. It might be unusual in your case. Iam 100% sure that my external auditor requested. IAM NOT LYING. if you would like I can forward to you the mail sent to him in order to approve that the external auditor requested that or May I give you his contact details check with him…
I it is already known that every figure in balance sheet and trail balance clickable but that will give the full ledger account not the subaccount summary balances.
I hope @lubos will have time to look into improving the GL Summary report and TB
I have doing this practice with more that one external auditor and it is common request for all of them. even EY and PWC Saudi requesting the same.
their format is like this
Starting Balance Year Transaction Closing Balance
Account Debit Credit Debit Credit Debit Credit
Are you talking about subaccounts of special accounts and for example each customer for accounts receivable?
In this case it’s correct not to have them in GL summary and transactions.
However a specific report would be great. It would be useful also for myself. @lubos?
yes @Davide Iam talking about the subaccount for every account group like cash at bank, cash on hand, customer balances, payable balances, all other sub level account. details TB should list all the account level.
With cash at bank and so on you can create control accounts to divide them.
we have 4 sub account for bank and these accounts not appearing in TB because it is in the second or third level. once we click on the clickable amount it will show the full GL Transaction not summary this could be achieved by making them at the first level but this will make our COA so long.
I certainly did not think you were lying, @abdulbari. And I have no wish to check with your auditor. I only expressed my opinion that the request was unusual.
This was exactly my point. If the trial balance were to show every subsidiary ledger, it would be overwhelming. You might think 4 bank accounts are not too many to show under Cash at bank. But what about 3,000 customers under Accounts receivable or 10,000 inventory items under Inventory on hand? In Manager, those are all handled the same way.
Again, you should use control accounts. You cannot sub-split a single voice of CoA. By the way, in many country, each account should have a single code. How would you mange this requirement with only one account merging for example different bank accounts?
I don’t understand all that fear in making CaO longer. Divide it and make your auditor happy.
What you want is a report not required by law that right now is not implemented in Manager.
It’s definitely highly unusual to have a Trial Balance that shows accounts from a sub-ledger. Accounts Receivables and Payables are not sub-accounts because sub-accounts belong to “General Ledger” family and the others are “sub-ledgers” - i.e. Purchases Ledger, Sales Ledger, etc. So, having a Trial Balance to combine these different ledgers is unusual and could become quite confusing. The trick is just to print a normal Trial Balance and then attach reports from sub-ledgers that agree back to the control accounts.
it might be I was not able to use the proper phrase for what I request. either control account or sub-account. I don’t want to debate it is usual or unusual. I have been working for clients where their software were built to provide such report in Saudi. since I am know trying to move my clients to MANAGER I raised this request because I have been working now for almost 3 days to fillfill the external audit requirement for one client only.
there is a link between my request and GL summary report but when I click down I will have the full transactions details while it should give me the summary per sub-accounts.
most of the system I was using have up to 5 Level sub-account and the system will allow you to generate TB up to the 5th level the same you will fined in Balance Sheet and Profit and Loss Statement. which is available also in SAP.
May I request @lubos to consider linking the starting balances to GL Summary and GL transactions in the opening balance in the GL Summary to show the correct movement.
if it is requested I can provide you with samples from other software where it will show these accounts if I have requested to show up to 3rd or 5th level sub-account.
under bank account we have 4 accounts I have to show them in separate line showing Opening balance, movement and closing balance the same I have applied to cash on hand, customers, suppliers, employees, accounts made under special accounts, capital account and so on.
this request has been raised to ease my work and my clients in future.
Why shall I give my self a headache to something not required.
I considering my self a business partner for MANAGER and willing to bring over all my clients but I will not be able if the software is not going to ease my work. I want to do less manual work since Iam doing this as part time job.
I hope that more request and like will come to this subject to move it to the ideas in the future
I see your point and I agree with most of your request. However, right now, a solution can be reached only by @lubos since he has to create an different/extra report. I see two ways to reach the results:
Then that is not a “traditional” trial balance, a trial balance shows the account balances “as at” a particular date. Your example is more akin to an “account movement” report by having opening / movements (debit / credit) and closing, akin to the GL transactions report but at a summary (not transaction) level.
Currently Manager has reports which support certain control accounts at the subaccount level, but these are only at the closing balance values, not for a date range.
I was thinking that maybe @lubos can add to the general ledger transactions report an additional functionality: “show subaccounts”
When someone decide to filter the report with a particular account, he can eventually flag “show subaccounts”.
In this case he will get a more detailed transactions report with the specific account divided by subaccounts ie, in the case of accounts receivable divided by clients, accounts payable by suppliers, special accounts by related subaccounts and so on.
having GL Transaction summary for subaccount level will help a lot. and will make the GL Summary more consistently since the second level show the transaction not the movement as per the first level.
This is something that I hope to be solvable by custom reports. There is new version of custom reports coming up which will clear quite a few topics in ideas category.
it is really appreciated to have this positive reply.
Thanks a lot
Read my suggestion here General Ledger Report
I don’t know if you want a similar thing with your general ledger transactions report.
And to tell @Tut @Brucanna @sam and @lubos QuickBooks has been showing that type of report for about since the first time I used it (way back).
When I was converting to Manager from QuickBooks at where I’m working as a finance officer now, that report made things easy for me. Transactions inside a control account were grouped by the accounts so you can easily know the balance of all the subsidiary accounts in a control account just at the glance of the trial balance. Makes your trial balance neat.