Prior to reviewing this element of the training material, we recommend getting a broad overview by watching the introductory videos on setting up your first file in the Quick Start Guide.
Entities
A Reportance file is designed to store the data for a client group for which you wish to use a common based chart of accounts for reporting. In many jobs, each Reportance .rep file will store the data for only one client entity.
When you first create a new Reportance file, you will be prompted to enter the details for your client. See the Entity screen article for details. You can edit these later by clicking on Edit from the Client Info tab.
Datasets
The accounting industry is able to work with a myriad of different accounting systems because of the common system of double-entry bookkeeping. Reportance leverages this concept and uses the trial balance as the common language with which to communicate between all different systems.
A Dataset in Reportance is simply a trial balance from a particular accounting file or source, for a particular date range. For this reason, when setting up a dataset, we need to know two things:
1) The date range of the trial balance
2) The source of data for the trial balance
Reportance will also ask you to name this trial balance, so you can easily reference this in other areas such as Reporting or Workpapers. We suggest using a naming convention that gives you enough information to uniquely identify the trial balance within a given entity. For example, an entity where you have one accounting file and say a budget, you might name the trial balances something like:
2013 Actual
2013 Budget
2014 Actual
2014 Budget
Another entity might run multiple business divisions or stores through different accounting files, so you might use the following descriptions:
2014 Actual - Melbourne Store
2014 Actual - Sydney Store
2014 Actual - Consolidated (for the consolidation of the two stores)
2014 Budget - Melbourne Store
etc
To create a dataset, click on Add Dataset from the Client Info screen. This will take you to the Dataset screen where you can input the required details.
The Account Hierarchy
Before looking at sources, we need to understand the basic account hierarchy in Reportance.
Reportance contains a Master Chart of Accounts which is nothing more than a collection of very high level account groups or headers. The actual chart of accounts will be populated by accounts from the various client accounting systems used to source data in the Reportance file.
Reportance is built powerfully to allow you to link accounts from multiple accounting files together. To do this, there are three 'layers' of accounts:
Account Header
Is a header where similar accounts can be grouped. It will contain one or more Account's.
Account
Is a Reportance account where you can manually change the account number and account name to anything you want. It will contain one or more Client Accounting System Account's.
Client Accounting System Account
Is a unique account no and account name from a particular accounting file source.
The following diagram illustrates these relationships:
Sources
Now that we know how Reportance handles the chart of accounts, we understand the importance of sources. A Source represents an accounting file from which we import trial balances. You can create and edit sources from the Sources screen.
Because of the way Reportance creates a unique Client Accounting System Account for every account from every source, we want to set up our source's to represent unique accounting files and not unique trial balances. This means that you do not create a new source for each year an accounting file is used, but you would create a single source for the one accounting file.
For example, let's suppose we have a client entity which has two stores running from different MYOB Version 19 files. In preparing accounts for the 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2017 financial years, the data has been sourced as follows:
2014 The accounts were prepared in HandiLedger, and the individual store files have not been updated to reflect the final accounts
2015 The accounts are prepared direct from the two MYOB files
2016 The accounts are prepared direct from the two MYOB files, and we have a Castaway Budget to compare this to
2017 The accounts are prepared direct from the two MYOB files, and we have a Castaway Budget to compare this to
In this case, we would expect the following sources to be set up, which represent each unique accounting file used to prepare this data:
We would NOT want to see something like:
Importing Data
Now we have the building blocks for importing data. By this stage you will have:
1) Entered your client details
2) Created a Dataset
- given the dataset a name
- set the dataset date range
- create a source to use for the dataset and selected it
You will have a dataset that looks something like the following:
Here, we have called the dataset '2014 Actual' so we can easily find it, we have specified the date range of 1 July 2013 to 30 June 2014, and selected this MYOB AccountRight Live file as a source.
Our next step is to import the trial balance data itself. The way this is done depends upon whether you are using an Excel based source (represented by a Reportance icon or an Excel icon), or an API based source (such as MYOB AccountRight Live or Xero):
For Excel:
We must open the Excel trial balance and import it using the instructions in the Importing from Excel article.
For an API (such as MYOB or Xero):
Click on the Load Data button, where Reportance will automatically connect to the accounting file and download the trial balance for import.
