The beginning of accounting refers to the point in time when you start using Procountor for accounting in addition to receiving sales invoices, purchase invoices, bank statements and reference payments.
Once you have saved the information under Management into the program according to the Main user’s starting instructions and sent the banking authorization to your bank, you can begin accounting and creating invoices. You can begin accounting in Procountor either at the start or in the middle of the fiscal year.
Phases of beginning accounting
1. Comparison of the chart of accounts
The chart of accounts in Procountor may differ from the one previously used by your company. Compare the charts of accounts and take account of the following:
- You will no longer require separate accounts for each VAT rate. Read more about VAT processing in Procountor.
- Are all accounts you used earlier needed? Could internal tracking be done using product reporting or dimensions (cost accounting monitoring), for example?
- Create the required sub-accounts in the chart of accounts.
- Take note of automatic postings such as
- 1700 Accounts receivable
- 2880 Payment transaction account
- 2930 VAT liability
- 2920 Employer's contribution liability.
- Salaries only have one account for deferred liabilities, 2950, for all insurance liabilities.
2. Import of salary information from the beginning of the year
If salary information is going to be reported from Procountor and the salary calculation was started in the middle of the year (shifting from an other software to Procountor), should all the salary calculations and travel invoices be brought to Procountor.
- You can create one salary slip per employee which will cover all the earned salaries from the beginning of the year. Remember to mark the slip as Do not include in any report if the salaries have already been reported to the Income register. Mark the salary slips as Payed elsewhere.
- If the the salary information will be analysed monthly from the reports it would be necessary to create salary slips separately to all the employees from all the moths that salary has been payed.
- Travel invoices can be created by using invoice import. Please note, that if travel invoices imported to Procountor have already been reported to Incomes register through another software, selection Do no report earnings on this invoice needs to be ticked on these invoices' Verification view (found under the title Incomes register reporting). This way travel invoices reported from another software will not be included on Earnings payment reports created in Procountor.
- When salaries and travel invoices are brought together with the beginning balance and the invoices are created as mentioned above, the overall balance should be adjusted to zero. This will ensure that the salary balance is not doubled in the accounting balance.
3. Accounting account balances
Before starting the official accounting you might have received purchase invoices and bank statements and reference payments to Procountor. All invoices and bank statements and reference payments create entries to the accounting reports. Check before starting the actual accounting if the accounts have balance and do the accounts need to be adjusted to zero.
- From Accounting > Reconciliation tools > Account inspection report, you will quickly see which accounts have a balance.
- If all balances for the periods preceding the beginning of accounting are zero, go to Save comparison data.
- If all balances found for the periods preceding the beginning of accounting are not zero, adjust the accounting entries to zero.
4. Adjusting accounting entries to zero
If Procountor has been used for purposes such as creating invoices but not for accounting, the automatic accounting entries generated by the receipts must be adjusted to zero before the beginning of actual accounting. For any consolidated salary slips imported from the beginning of the year, the accounts are also adjusted the accounts to zero.
5. Open accounts ledgers
The sales and purchase ledgers open at the beginning can be saved to the program in two ways: as balances or by invoice.
6. Saving the comparison data and opening balances
Comparison data from the previous fiscal year and possible opening balances are saved when you begin using Procountor.
- Save the balances of the day preceding the beginning of accounting.
- You may also import the monthly accounting account balances.
7. Verifying that accounting has begun successfully
Once you have imported sales and purchase ledger information to Procountor and saved the account balances, please check that the accounts ledger and accounting are equal.
- Use the Reconciliation report for open invoices found under Accounting> Reconciliation tools for this.