Control Accounts

The Control Accounts screen, accessible from the Settings tab, enables you to create, manage, and customize your own control accounts in Manager.

Understanding Control Accounts

In a typical business, various accounts are monitored to keep track of balances, such as:

• Bank accounts
• Customers
• Suppliers
• Employees
• Capital accounts
• Fixed assets
• Intangible assets
• Investments

Each account has a balance indicating amounts you own, are owed, or owe. The Balance Sheet report in financial statements is designed to display the balances of your assets and liabilities. However, including balances for all individual accounts can make the balance sheet unwieldy, especially when dealing with hundreds or thousands of accounts.

To address this, similar accounts are combined to display as a single balance on the Balance Sheet. For example:

• The balances of all customers are presented under the Accounts receivable account.
• The balances of all bank and cash accounts are displayed under the Cash and cash equivalents account.

This approach keeps your Balance Sheet concise and straightforward.

Customizing Account Groupings

If you prefer to organize accounts differently, you can customize how accounts are grouped using the Control Accounts screen. This allows you to create new control accounts for the types of accounts you wish to divide.

Example: Custom Fixed Asset Accounts

Instead of having a single Fixed assets at cost account, you might want to have separate accounts such as:

• Machinery, at cost
• Vehicles, at cost
• Furniture, at cost
• Buildings, at cost
• Land, at cost

To achieve this:

1. Create custom control accounts for each fixed asset category in the Control Accounts screen.
2. Go to the Fixed Assets tab.
3. Edit your individual fixed assets.
4. Use the new Control account field to specify under which control account each fixed asset should be reported.

Example: Displaying Individual Bank Accounts

If you wish to show your bank accounts individually on the Balance Sheet report:

1. Create a control account for each bank account in the Control Accounts screen.
2. Assign each bank account to its respective control account.

By doing this, the balances of your bank accounts will be displayed separately on the Balance Sheet, rather than being combined under Cash and cash equivalents.

Benefits of Using Control Accounts

Custom control accounts allow you to:

• Organize your financial statements in a way that better reflects your business structure.
• Provide more detailed information by displaying specific account balances individually.
• Keep your Balance Sheet organized and tailored to your reporting preferences.

Accessing Control Accounts

To access the Control Accounts screen:

• Navigate to the Settings tab in Manager.
• Click on Control Accounts.

From here, you can create, edit, or delete control accounts as needed to customize your financial reporting.