Expediting Your Month-End General Ledger Closing Using QAD Enterprise Applications

Posted on: June 29, 2010 | By: SuperUser Account | QAD Financials

Closing your general ledger should be a seamless event lasting from 1 to 3 days in length. Assuming your company uses the operation modules of QAD, integration of those modules provide financial transactions to the general ledger for the following transactions:

· Purchase order receipts including purchase price variance calculation from standard or average cost.
· Voucher transactions including accounts payable price and quantity variances.
· Sales Order shipments at standard or average cost.
· Invoicing transactions for revenue and accounts receivable.
· Manufacturing transactions including movement of inventory from the perpetual ledger to work in process and to the perpetual finished goods ledger including manufacturing rate and quantity variances for material, labor, burden and subcontract components of the manufactured parts costs.

Typically, sub-ledgers that are not integrated include payroll and Property, Plant and Equipment. This results in journal entries required for closing that are not integrated including the following:
· Actual payroll cost including employee and employer taxes, garnishments, etc.
· A payroll accrual of payroll cost accrued since the last payroll through month end.
· Property, Plant and Equipment entries including asset additions, disposals, transfers, retirements and depreciation expense.
· Accrued Expenses including Legal, Taxes, etc…
· Prepaid Expenses.
· Budgeted Expenses.

The tools in the QAD’s general ledger for recording the non integrated entries include:
· Standard Transaction Maintenance. Use this tool to record the payroll, PP&E and other entries from sub-ledgers that are not integrated from QAD.
· Reversing Transaction Maintenance. Use Reversing Transaction Maintenance to record the accruals and pre-paids. Reversing entries record in the current closing month are automatically reversed on the following month. This will insure that there are no un-accounted for accruals and pre-paids in the next accounting month.
· Transaction Copy. Use transaction copy of journal entries that are the same month over month. This can be used for budgeted expense entries that are recorded throughout the accounting year.

The versions of QAD’s Enterprise Application Standard Edition, including all eB2.1 and older version did not have Excel integration built into the software for loading Journal Entries. Also, if a journal entry with more than one entity is recorded, than the accountant must manually balance the journal entry across entities. A number of third-party applications exist to automate this process. Logan Consulting journal entry upload application allows the user to do the following:

· Multiple GL references per single upload.
· Both Reversing and Standard Entries uploaded in a single upload.
· Automatic inter-entity balancing if journal entries cross entities.

For more information regarding this content, email avitullo@logan-consulting.com.

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