Defining Sorting Methods

Use the Period Sorting Methods form to define your own indexes for running financial statements.

The best response will occur when your desired output matches an existing sorting method.

To enable a disabled method, you must run the Rebalance Ledger Period Totals utility. Although you may create as many as 99 sorting methods, there are drawbacks to creating too many:

  • the time it takes to build all the buckets
  • the disk space used by the additional buckets
  • the increase in ledger posting time

There are two predefined sorting methods:

  • Method 1: account
  • Method 2: account/unit codes 1-4. This method must be enabled if you want to publish the GLMovement BOD. Also, the Index Active field must be selected in order to publish actual fiscal accounting data for the GLMovement BOD.

Neither of the predefined sorting methods can be deleted. You can disable them, but you can not delete them.

Note: To see output sorted by account/unit code 1, do not use the first method because the bucket is too large. This method groups the amounts for all transactions with the unit codes together and does not provide enough detail. The second method works, but it is slower because it adds numerous buckets to arrive at the answer. When you have a match, only one bucket will need to be looked at.

You may also define your own sorting methods. Here are some tips for setting up the indexes:

  • Values for the combo-boxes need to be unique (or blank) within one index.
  • An empty combo-box means that totaling will not occur at that level.

For example, if Sort Field 1 = Account and Sort Field 2 = Unit Code 1, one reporting unit total record will be created for each unique account number/ Unit Code 1 combination.