Dependent account definition

In the Dependent Account Definition page you select source accounts and specify that, when a user writes a value to a source account, values are automatically written to related and contra accounts. The values are written in proportions and periods that you specify.

The list of accounts is filtered to prevent illogical selections of source, related, and contra accounts. For example, if you select account A as the source account, then you cannot select account A as a related or contra account.

You do not have to make the related accounts or contra accounts writable: that is, they do not have to be assigned to the planning step.

For each related account you specify a factor and a time shift. The factor is the percentage of the amount written to the source account to write to the dependent account.

The time shift specifies the period in which a value is written to a related account. By default, values are written instantly to related accounts: that is they are written to the same period as the value that is written to the source account. You can instead select one of these time shifts:


Time shift	Description
Booking End of Year	Write values to the end of the year.
Booking End of Quarter	Write values to the end of the quarter.
Booking in x Periods	Specify the number of periods. For example, specify 2 to write to the period two months after the month in which the value is written to the source account.

Values written to contra accounts are written to the same period as values written to the source or the related account.

This table shows what effect writing back an increase on various source accounts has on the equivalent contra accounts (CA).


Source account	Write back amount	CA Assets	CA Liabilities	CA Equity	CA Revenues	CA Expenses
Assets	100	-100	100	100	100	100
Liabilities	100	100	-100	-100	-100	-100
Equity	100	100	-100	-100	-100	-100
Revenues	100	100	-100	-100	-100	-100
Expenses	-100	-100	100	100	100	100

This table shows what effect writing back an increase on various source accounts has on the equivalent related accounts (RA).


Source account	Write back amount	RA Assets	RA Liabilities	RA Equity	RA Revenues	RA Expenses
Assets	100	100	100	100	100	-100
Liabilities	100	100	100	100	100	-100
Equity	100	100	100	100	100	-100
Revenues	100	100	100	100	100	-100
Expenses	-100	100	100	100	100	-100

Dependent accounts must be defined before starting data entry.

Note: Global sign definition specifies the use of the positive (+) and negative (-) signs. For Expenses, increases are written back to the database with the negative sign.