Configuring Ledger Balances

SunSystems holds ledger data in the form of detailed transaction lines stored in ledger tables. In addition to individual transactions, you may also need SunSystems to hold balances and to be able to publish the balances to other systems on a scheduled basis. While you can use Optional Ledger Tables (OLT) to hold period balances, these are not sufficient for the level of detail and accuracy that is required for certain solutions, such as for SunSystems Reporting Services (SRS), Infor Q&A, and for publishing ledger data to other systems. For these requirements, you can use Ledger Balances to hold and publish accurate ledger data in the form of balances and balance movements.

To set up ledger balances, use Ledger Balance Configuration (LBC). Set up a Balance Configuration for each required business unit / ledger combination.

Opening Balances

Opening Balances are stored for balance sheet accounts (including creditor, debtor and client accounts). When configuring the balances you set a Start Year as described in Using Ledger Balance Configuration below; the opening balances for an account are calculated as the accumulated total of all ledger transactions in the account prior to the start year.

Year Opening Balances

In addition to the start year's opening balances, yearly opening balances are calculated for every year subsequent to the start year. This improves efficiency, for example, when querying the current balance of a debtor or creditor account, as this is calculated as the current year's opening balance + the sum of the year's period balance movements up to the current period (or to the relevant period for a year-to-date balance).

Balance Movements

Balance Movements are stored for all account types, and are calculated as the total of all transactions in an account for each accounting period, or day, and can be broken out by further accounting parameters depending on the options you set in the balance configuration.

  • Period Balance Movements

    In the simplest configuration, summary balance movements are maintained for each account and accounting period. These are called Period Movements. The year-to-date movement of an account is calculated by summing the period movements for that year, up to the period in question.

    You can use Ledger Balance Configuration (LBC) to configure a more granular level of movements, breaking out the ledger balances by various data types, such as ledger analysis, journal type, and accounting date.

  • Daily Balance Movements

    If 'Include Accounting Date' is selected on the balance configuration, daily movements are maintained, which are similar to period movements except that a date is included on the movements so that the balances are broken out by accounting date. Since SunSystems allows journals to be posted with transaction dates that are independent of the accounting period, the daily movements must be balanced by accounting date.

Keeping Balances Up To Date

To keep the ledger balances up to date and to publish the updated balances (if required), you can:

  • manually refresh the balances using Ledger Balance Management (LBM)
  • automate the balance refresh using Transfer Desk (TRD), and then set up a schedule on the computer that will be used to automatically refresh the balances, for example, nightly.

When the balances are refreshed, the period movements are updated, and the following year's opening balances are adjusted (for relevant account types). Therefore, when the ledger balances are updated, the current balance of an account in the SunSystems ledger is exactly mirrored by the ledger balance data, calculated as the sum of the account's year opening balance (if relevant) plus the period movements accumulated since the year opening balance.

New and Modified Ledger Transactions

When new journals are posted, and when existing ledger data is changed, the details are written to a temporary ledger delta list which contains all of the changes to the ledger since the last balance update was carried out. This delta list is then used to apply the changes to the ledger balances when they are next updated. For example, if the analysis on a transaction is updated after the journal is posted, or if a journal line is split, the relevant ledger data changes are stored in the delta list so that they are applied equally to the balances when they are updated. This ensures that all relevant ledger data is accurately reflected in the ledger balances.