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Welcome to Zoom Accounts

Zoom accounts is the core code upon which your enterprise accounts software is built.
This Wiki explains this core functionality. For further help or information on the features of your software you should contact Support.

• Overview
  • Customising the Main Window
  • Data entry Windows - general features
  • Printing and Spreadsheets
• Nominal (General) Ledger and Accounts
• Period ends
  • Month end
  • Year end
• Support

Overview

Customising the Main Window

Data entry Windows - general features

After clicking a shortcut from the program main window a navigation window will open. Here is a purchase invoice navigation window for an example.

On the left is the list of suppliers in the Purchase Ledger. You can click to select a supplier and see the previously entered invoices. Double click a supplier to open the Purchase Ledger Account or enter a new supplier record with the New button above.

Printing and Spreadsheets

Period ends

Accounting systems work in periods which are commonly calendar months, however they can be four weekly or any other accounts interval which you have set in the Enterprise Settings ( Tools | Settings from the program main window menu).
In addition to these periods, accounts systems work in financial years. Once a financial year is "closed" its results are published so that the transactions become fixed. Normally any adjustments after this time will need to be made in the subsequent financial year.

Month end

Each of the accounting ledgers has a "Ledger date", being the end of the current month (or whatever your data entry period is).
You can enter sales and purchase invoices, cash and bank transactions, stock and all other accounting documents for any date.
The daybooks will only post transactions to ledgers up to the ledger date. Later dated transactions can be entered but will not post through to the ledger until the ledger date is changed. This enables you to obtain a clean "cut off" for the ledger transactions at the month-end.

Once transaction entry is complete for a ledger (and you have printed the period end balance list or other procedures at the period end, if required) you can carry out the month end procedure for the ledger. This can be run from the main window wizard or from the individual ledger's menu - Activities | Month end.
The normal behaviour of the month end procedure is to increment the ledger month end date to the next period end. Some ledgers have special additional procedures such as reconciliation to the bank statements or credit control.

Once the period end has been completed, the daybooks for the ledger will allow transactions to be posted through for the new period.

The month-ends for the various ledgers can be carried out independently of the Nominal Ledger. The Nominal Ledger stores transactions for subsequent accounting periods in a "deferred postings" file until its own month end procedure is complete.

The Nominal Ledger month-end procedure is described here.

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Year end

The year end procedure is actually more of a "year start" procedure to the extent that you first take a duplicate copy of your current year data and then carry out the "Year end" procedure on the duplicate to prepare it to become the data for the new accounting year.

For illustration let us suppose our financial year is 1 April 2010 to 31 March 2012. This is the "2012" Financial year.

At the end of March 2012:

• complete the entry of all the transactions for the month
• adjust for fixed asset depreciation, accruals and prepayments as described in the Nominal Ledger Wiki
• make all other adjustments necessary to finalise the management accounts (usually being your draft Financial accounts subject to audit) for the year
  but do not complete the March month end procedure (which would change the Ledger dates to April) at this stage.

Next, take an archive backup of your data then take a duplicate copy the data file, simply renaming it to become the 2013 data file as described in the System Administrator Wiki.

In the current year (2012 in this example), carry out the Year end procedure using the wizard on the program main window. This wizard will change the default year to the new year and immediately redirect to the NEW YEAR data file (2013 in this example). If it does not open correctly then check out the problem with your system administrator.

The Year end wizard lists the available year end procedures which will include all the accounts system ledgers and the Nominal Ledger together with anything specific to your system.
The default year end procedure for the accounts ledgers is to clear the audit trail (input documents and transaction records) for all cleared transactions which are older than a specific date (default 24 months previous).
The year end procedure for the Nominal Ledger will take the previous year closing balances to become the new year opening balances and clear all the transaction data. See here for a detailed description of the Nominal Ledger year end procedure.

Once the year end procedure is complete on the new year (2013 in this example) data, then a Month end procedure can be run to allow data entry for the first month (April in the example) of the new accounting year.

Your accounts program will now open the new accounts year data by default and the previous accounts years will be available from the drop down selection box on the program main window.

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Support

You should initially seek support from your support provider.

For further support resources or if you are developing this software in-house and do not have a support provider, then help and support is available from the project web site.