Updating the Ledger Balances

The Ledger Balance file contains summaries of the transactions from the ledger file. It is used to improve the speed with which financial reports and Trial Balances are produced.

Note: The ledger balance file is created using Optional Ledger Tables (OLT).

Ledger Balance Update (LBU) is used to update the ledger balances with the latest transactions from your actual or budget ledger so that reports using the balance data give a true representation of the data.

The balances hold data summarized by the following transaction details:

account code
period
currency code
provisional posting flag
corrections flag
analysis code.

Other information such as asset code or journal type is not held. The balance file cannot be used for reports which rely on these codes.

In addition, you can consolidate individual transaction analysis codes to consolidate the ledger information further. The balance file is only used for a financials report when it is appropriate to the report setup. Therefore financial reports which include items such as transaction reference, description and journal number, do not use the balances.

Note: If you want to clear the ledger balance file completely, you can do this by recreating it in Optional Ledger Tables (OLT).

To Update the Ledger Balances

Select Ledger Balance Update (LBU) from the main SunSystems menu.
From the Action menu select Process, or click the Process button.

When you select Process, any transactions posted since the last update are consolidated and added to the balance file.

The time it takes to update your balances depends on the number of transactions you have entered since the last update. You may want to update your balances prior to running weekly or monthly financial reports.

Updating the Balance File When Running Reports

When you request a report that uses the Ledger Balances file, you are offered the option to update the balances. This is the same as running Ledger Balances Update (LBU) and is useful if you are running a single report.

Note: The Trial Balance does not include this feature.

However, if you are printing a series of reports for a particular time frame, it is more efficient to use Ledger Balances Update (LBU) to update the balances once, and then produce all of the reports required without selecting the update option for the reports.

Note: You can set up your ledger so that reports which use the Ledger Balances file do so regardless of whether or not it is up to date. If you want to do this, check the Report From Balance File field in Ledger Setup (LES).