Departments & Locations
To access the Departments/Locations Table select Tables|Departments/Locations from the CAPITAL main menu.
A department can be thought of as a central point of reference where information can be accumulated and at some later date reported on. A department is similar to a cost centre; however, in CAPITAL, departments can also keep track of sources of income, not just costs or expenses, so the term "department" is used in place of cost centre.
Departments are used when you need to:
Group sets of transactions under a specific category for reporting purposes. For example, you may wish to look at the invoices generated by your Service Division and compare those to your Sales Division.
When you need to keep track of and move stock between multiple physical locations. Departments can be used to represent these different locations.
When you need to track budgets or "internal" expenses. Typically, the bulk of transactions that occur in most businesses in some way involve external accounts. For example, when you sell a product to a customer or when you pay the telephone bill, these transactions affect people or organisations outside your business. If you need to keep track of which of your branches is using the most office supplies, an internal account can be used to manage this type of information.
You will occasionally find CAPITAL documentation and on-line help making reference to "internal accounts". These are often exactly the same thing as a department. However, most departments are not directly assigned invoices or allocated expenses. The department is simply associated with that particular transaction. Internal accounts often have transactions specifically assigned to them.
For accounting purposes and for other practical reasons many businesses operate as a single entity but really are in several different lines of business. For example, an automotive company may distribute spare parts, perform electrical repair work and do general repairs. It can be useful to keep track of the performance of each division. Departments can be used for the purpose of keeping track of and comparing the financial performance of these divisions.
When multi-department mode is activated, specific operations in CAPITAL will prompt for a departmental code. Transactions such as invoices, sales orders, purchase orders, supplier returns or quotations may be assigned to a department code. Reports can be produced that indicate or restrict activity by department.
As mentioned, a department can be thought of as an internal division within a company or a different physical site: for example, a warehouse may distribute to several retail outlets all under the management of one company. CAPITAL will treat each location as a department. This is useful for profit centre reporting.
Departments may also act as stock locations. For information on using a department as a stock location consult the topic: Multi-Location Stock Control.
In order to set-up and work with departments you must:
1. Run INSTALLATION Workshop and under the Install|Advanced|Departments ensure that Activate Multi-departments is ticked.
See the topic: Advanced Options - Departments for details.
2. Add the department to the Department Table. Press the button and enter a department code and a department title.
A
department code cannot match any existing customer or supplier account code that may already be in your
system. It must be unique.
When
a department is added to CAPITAL, an internal account is created in your customer and supplier records.
Expenses and other operating overheads may be assigned to departments placed in the supplier account file.
Income and other forms of operating profit may be assigned to departments placed in the customer account
file. Since it is likely that most departments will be responsible for generating income and expenses,
CAPITAL creates these accounts in both areas.
Managing Departments
For information on managing department settings consult the topic: Managing Departments.
Hints & Tips
Transactions billed DIRECTLY to internal accounts (rather than transactions that are merely assigned a department code) are treated by CAPITAL as being internal to your organisation or a budget. They are not passed onto CAPITAL GL Controller for "posting" in the general ledger.
To manage departments users must have security access rights for both customers and suppliers. For example, if you wish to delete a department you must have the security clearance to delete both customer and supplier accounts.
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