Features And Benefits

CAPITAL GL Controller is an advanced financial management, planning, reporting, budgeting and automated general ledger program. It deals with those aspects of book keeping that are generally referred to as 'financial' accounting as opposed to 'management' accounting.

The software system that comprises CAPITAL Office deals specifically with the day to day management aspects of running a business, such as controlling stock, raising purchase orders, billing customers, etc. While CAPITAL Office is capable of providing some aspects of financial management (it can, for example, produce a trading statement showing if you are running your business in a profitable manner), CAPITAL GL Controller gives you far greater control in the organisation and presentation of your business records for consolidated analysis, auditing and taxation purposes.

Customise For Your Business

CAPITAL GL Controller will allow you to enter a chart of accounts that meets your specific business requirements, or use the standard business chart. One of the advantages of using the existing chart is that CAPITAL GL Controller's financial report writer and financial formula table have already been set-up to produce a variety of financial statements based on account groupings found in this chart. The existing chart can easily be modified to suite your existing needs, or, you may delete or create entirely new charts if you want to. In which case you will also need to inform the financial formula table of the coding arrangement of your chart so that it can continue to produce financial statements automatically for you.

Powerful Reports

CAPITAL GL Controller's financial reporting system will allow you to produce income/trading/profit and loss statements, balance sheets, expense schedules, and a variety of other reports depending on your requirements. There are no limitations on the types of reports you can create, provided of course, that the information you require out of the system has been coded in such a way that it can be extracted from the system again. It is up to you to determine the level of detail you require so that you can code your information appropriately. You can produce reports for a single company, multiple companies (up to 4000) or for an unlimited number of departments within a company. The only real limitation is that your chart of accounts cannot have more than 4000 individual account codes on it. Since the average small business has between 100 to 200 codes in their chart of accounts, this should not present a problem.

The financial reporting system will also allow you to compare information from different periods or budgets. For example, you can produce a year-to-date profit and loss statement that compares this year's figures to last year's or to a pre-determined budget. Or you may wish to compare this months results against last month's or the prior three months or against the start of the financial year, etc. Since creating a financial statement can be a complex and time consuming task, CAPITAL provides the quick report writer. This program will create a variety of pre-defined reports for you. They may be all that you will ever need. If your requirements are specialised, however, you can modify the 'style sheet' information stored in these reports to produce customised reports, or you may wish to construct special reports completely from scratch. CAPITAL provides the flexibility. The choice is yours.

In addition to the financial reporting system, CAPITAL GL Controller provides a number of standard reports for printing your chart of accounts, your budgets, trial balances, the contents of your journals, as well as audit trail and other information.

Wizards

Two powerful wizards are available to assist you with performing infrequent tasks. The Create Company Wizard will create a new general ledger, ready for you to use.

The End Period Wizard automatically transfers or updates the transactions found in CAPITAL Office into your general ledger, leaving you ready to run your reports. If applicable, it will create opening and closing stock adjustment journals and reconcile your GST input credit and sales accounts.

Multi-Currency Ledger

CAPITAL GL Controller is a full multi-currency general ledger. It is capable of working in either the base currency of your company or organisation, or it can be used to track postings in an unlimited number of foreign currencies simultaneously. You may report in either your base currency, or in any particular foreign currency, for most account codes in your general ledger chart of accounts. You may even enter journals in your base currency or use a foreign currency and have the system use an exchange rate to convert back to your base currency.

The multi-currency ledger even permits you to record the exchange rate for an unlimited number of currencies as per the end of every period. This facilitates the the calculation of unrealized exchange gain or loss and its impact on your business.

Other Features

CAPITAL accepts up to 14 character account codes. You can specify "input masks" to force codes to be entered in a consistent manner. For example, if you wish to enter codes that have the sequence "999-999" CAPITAL can be instructed to always place a "dash" between the first three and last three digits. You can also change account codes after postings have taken place, and you can "lock" account codes if you wish to phase out or prevent the use of redundant codes.

The global account code maintenance utility will also allow you to delete, copy or edit sets of account codes when first constructing a chart of accounts. This can save an enormous amount of time if you are constructing multi-department charts.

Journals can be entered into the general ledger as sets of batches or in "on-line" mode for direct posting to the master file. Batches offer greater auditing control. You can assign each batch a unique number (you cannot post the same batch number twice), enter a description, reference and the name or initials of the operator responsible for it. You can also enter a "control" total for cross-checking purposes. This ensures that the details you enter add up to a pre-determined debit/credit total.

On-line journals offer the advantage of speed. You don't need to create batches in order to post entries to the master file.

'Matched journals' allow you to enter a contra account code to offset against a series of journal entries. For example, if you are entering a batch that consists of a series of creditor invoices that you will be paying out of a single bank account, you can enter the bank account code as the contra code. This allows you to enter only one side of a double-entry in order to save time.

Standing journals allow you to create a series of "standard" batches that you can re-use an unlimited number of times. For example, if you have a series of accruals that you need to post each month, you can enter these into a standing journal and then create a series of "general batches" for each relevant period. Regular journals can easily be transferred to and from standing journals.

Data Integrity

A variety of tools are provided for correcting errors. If you accidentally post an incorrectly entered batch, you can re-post the reversal of this batch to remove errors. If you get off to a bad start, you can even get CAPITAL to create a batch that can reverse the entire period. CAPITAL GL Controller offers DataShield Technology that can roll-back and restore the integrity of your information if it is damaged by an interruption (such as a power failure or computer freeze up) during posting. The account integrity utility checks the integrity of your master file and can correct many errors automatically if your data is exposed to other types of harm.

Because CAPITAL will only allow the posting of balanced entries, you can be assured that many types of common input error are not possible when using GL Controller.

Budgets

A budget can be assigned to each account and to each period of each account in the general ledger. A variety of budget calculators are provided to make this task as simple and as quick as possible. You will be able to scale, best fit, proportion, divide or manually enter budget amounts for each account. You will then be able to copy these budgets to other accounts and then globally adjust them if required. If you make a mistake, CAPITAL allows you to start over from the beginning by restoring your original budgets. As well, you can enter the results of the prior year if you wish to produce comparative reports.

Financial Formulas

The financial formula table allows you to assign sets of account codes to "group codes". This allows you to see expenses for a period, or total sales, etc., For the period or year, for actuals, for budgets and for the prior year. There is no need to print a report. Financial formula group codes also tell CAPITAL's quick report writer how to construct various financial statements. Constructing a complex report can be as simple as creating a series of group codes and assigning general ledger account code ranges to them.

Security

CAPITAL GL Controller's security system is second to none in terms of flexibility and simplicity. Up to fifty unique passwords may be entered. Operators may change their password at any time. Each password can be assigned an operator name, and a unique "access profile". The access profile determines the viewing, adding, editing, deleting and printing rights for a variety of different operating areas. For example, you can restrict access to the viewing, creation or deletion of companies, general, on-line or standing journals, the posting of batches, changes to the chart of accounts, global chart adjustments, installation parameters, end of year roll-over, budgeting and reporting, and many other facilities depending on what you want each user to have access to.

Integration

CAPITAL GL Controller can also fully integrate with CAPITAL Office. CAPITAL Office can update batches as each transaction in CAPITAL is entered or you can create new batches for any designated date range at the end of each period. CAPITAL's GL sets allow you to specify in minute detail which customer, supplier, bank and cash book accounts, as well as currencies, stock groups or even stock items, effect particular chart of account codes. A "hierarchy of priorities" (described in detail in "Concepts") determines which GL set codes have priority over others when transactions are entered into CAPITAL Office. This will allow users of CAPITAL Office to maintain and update a complex chart of accounts without knowing anything about double-entry book keeping! When transactions are deleted, or when dates are changed in CAPITAL Office, the appropriate sets of reversals as well as new journal entries are automatically created.