MoneyWorks Manual
Multilevel Account Structures
The MoneyWorks Gold department feature provides you with a two-dimensional account structure1. This is very powerful if you need to report for entities within your organisation, such as vehicles, projects, staff and (obviously) departments.
Example 1
An organisation runs a number of vehicles and needs to track vehicle performance. Each vehicle can be represented as a department in MoneyWorks Gold, and direct income and expenditure allocated directly against the vehicle. When new vehicles are added, there is no need to change the chart of accounts — they simply need to create a new department for the vehicle. Vehicles can also be organised into different types (diesel, petrol, trucks, vans or whatever), and the performance of these overall types (called classifications in MoneyWorks) can be monitored.
Example 2
An organisation wishes to report on inputs by individual staff members and their corresponding outputs. The staff members can be represented by departments, but what about the inputs and outputs? They have identified outputs which they have numbered as follows:
1. promotional
2. seminars
3. reports
4. training
The inputs are standard items such as postage, photocopying etc.
Their chart of accounts could be structured as four digit codes where the first three digits refer to the inputs and the last to the output. So if 200 for example was the prefix code for postage; the account code 2001 would be postage for promotion, 2002 postage for seminars etc. Associating this with salespeople departments would give 2002-JB — postage for a seminar given by JB.
In account enquiries and in custom reports, you could then specify wildcard patterns such as:
200@ Provides a total figure for postage
???2@ Provides a figure for seminars only
200?-JB Provides postage expenditure by JB for all outputs
@-JB Provides total figures for JB
Many more combinations are possible. For further information —see Account Code Matching For the use of wildcard patterns in custom reports —see Account Code.
Example 3
Many medical and dental practices are run as a form of partnership, where the income and some of the expense items are directly attributed to one of the partners, but the general overheads are shared equally among all of them.
Imagine that John, Derek and Helen are doctors working in this manner. There are several ways they could structure their accounts.
- With each partner as a department.
Thus the direct income account for John might be 100-J, and for Derek 100-D, whilst the direct expenses, such as the wages for their respective practice nurses could be 210-J, 210-D. The rent of their premises (which is shared) would be non-departmentalised (e.g. 320)
This allows individual income statements to be produced for each doctor using the departmental breakdown.
- With each partner’s initial as the last character of the account code.
Thus the income accounts would be 100J, 100D and 100H, and the practice nurses 210J, 210D and 210H. Each of these accounts could be associated with a category (JOHN, DEREK, HELEN), and the category breakdown could be used for the individual reports.
Although the latter is harder to set up than the former, it does offer one significant advantage — it can track each doctor’s GST, a common requirement in this sort of situation. To do this, new tax codes (J, D and H say) would need to be created and assigned to each account2.
For more information on departmental accounting —see Departmental Accounts.
1 This can be extended to up to eleven levels using MoneyWorks’ powerful reporting and account enquiry facilities — but you must have a consistent numbering system for your account codes and/or department codes. ↩
2 But note that the GST Guide will not work in this situation, as it requires standard GST codes. ↩