Mapping accounts

When you are entering records for an alternate chart of accounts set, all of the primary or base account/sub-account combinations should be mapped to an alternate account.  Failure to do this can result in invalid information being output on the Financial Statements printed by Alternate Account.  Once all of the primary accounts have been mapped to the correct alternate account, the Trial Balance by Alternate Account can be produced and compared to the standard Trial Balance to verify that all account balances have been mapped.  If the two trial balance reports do not have the same totals or if the debit and credit amounts do not match on the Trial Balance by Alternate Account, it is extremely likely that you have failed to map all primary accounts.

The basic rules to keep in mind are.

•      All primary accounts must point to one alternate account.

•      More than one primary account can be assigned to one alternate account. This logic works only one way (one primary account cannot be pointed to more than one alternate account but several primary accounts can be summarized or combined into one alternate account).

•      The account type and sort sequence should generally not be changed from the information in the primary account record since this determines which report and where on each report each account will appear.  If for example, you were to map a current asset account from the primary account records to an alternate account that was an income statement account the primary account would show on the balance sheet when run by main account number but the same amount could show on the income statement when running financials by alternate account number.  This can cause confusion or incorrect results so care should be taken when specifying an alternate account type or sort that differs from the information in the primary account record.

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Technical Notes