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Complete change to the Chart of Accounts

measpinallmeaspinall Member Posts: 3
edited 2005-08-09 in NAV/Navision Classic Client
My client is a multi company international corporation. They have 55 legal entities using Navision 3.70

All of the companies have very different charts of accounts. This makes group consolidation more difficult than in needs to be.

I am personally "responsible" for 17 of these companies.

The Group has decided that they want to implement a standardised chart of accounts across all Navision-User companies by the 31st March 2006. The division (17 companies) for which I am working wants this completed by the 31 December. To make things more complicated, we need to change the dimensions in most of the companies too and implement the Jobs granule into all but 5 of them - because most of the 17 currently use Global Dim1 to identify the "job".

We have looked at several options (including renumbering - which has been discounted; and creating new companies) and they all require large resource and a huge amount of work. Our Navision support partner has told us that they have never known anyone who has actually changed the whole chart - several who have considered it and decided that it was too difficult.

Does anyone have any ideas as to how this can be achieved with relative ease. Has anyone else done this before?

Thanks
Mark

Comments

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    UrmasUrmas Member Posts: 76
    If you do not want to do the renumbering (and most likely you do not want to do it - you just do not have enough time), it may be reasonable to just add the new accounts to the Chart of Accounts as parallel PL and BS. Use the new accounts starting from new financial year and hide the "old ones" using for example security filters. If you need reports from both periods, you can build up account schedules in order to do that.
    later you can date compress the entries and then it is possible to "merge" the old accounts into new ones.
    How about posting groups? In order to have standard accounts you should also have standard posting groups and setups. Or at least it makes a lot of sense as if you dont, the job will become quite unbearable.
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    alsolalsol Member Posts: 243
    Hi measpinall,
    We are currently introducing Navision in different countries and had hours of discussion about group chart of accounts. Many of our group companies have their own Chart of accounts according their local laws. And they weren't happy about the first decision to introduce a group-wide chart.

    After that we decided the following:

    Each company can have his Chart of accounts as they like to. We have a group chart of accounts as recommendation and every local chart has to be as detailed as our group chart is.

    Then we create for every single group company an account scheme for the group chart of account and another one for the monthly reporting. In this schemes you can also include dimensions (which we use to show intercompany entries)

    With this solution we have and efficient bookkeeping in the group companies because they can have their own account numbers, structure... but for group controling we have all datas in the same structure and every figure is comparable.

    But also this solution requires a lot of ressources but I think it would be much less than creating new companies or renumbering accounts. Besides that: renumbering of used accounts is in some countries not allowed because of transparency reasons.

    I hope this helps,
    Regards

    Felix
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    dmitripdmitrip Member Posts: 44
    Hi All,
    In the case of international company/corporation I see the couple ways:
    1. Every company has their own COA and corporation do consolidation only on the reporting level.
    2. As suggested cyberscout. It’s a good approach. You consolidate data based on the COA groups. It could be two-three tier system, like local COA –> detailed corporation COA -> grouped corporation COA (last two can be combined). For me it’s the most feasible way.
    You can embed corporation account groups into local COA (if it isn’t against local laws/rules).

    When we faced a group companies COA changes we RENUMBERED COA. But we didn’t have too many accounts we had to renumber and database size was comparatively small.
    Personally I’m against creating the new companies for this purpose but sometimes it’s the only a way you can follow.
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    UrmasUrmas Member Posts: 76
    In fact it mostly depends WHY are you doing it.
    If it is to have standard reporting then the easist way is to create account schedules. It is relatively easy and effective
    If the reason is some kind of centralization of bookeeping then the approach of parallel companies/COA-s or renumbering may be an issue.
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    measpinallmeaspinall Member Posts: 3
    The reason(s) for the change are quite complex:

    1) To provide an easier means of consolidated reporting

    2) To ensure compliance with IFRS

    3) To enable standardised processes and policies to be created and maintained

    4) To provide the ability to move to a centralised "Shared Service" for finance operations

    5) To make my life difficult!

    Mark
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    csimoneauxcsimoneaux Member Posts: 168
    I have a client that needed to renumber their Fixed assets. There were over 70,000. I created a a table which they would list Old & new Fixed Asset number. They would kick off my report and this would use the rename trigger. This would search the system and rename this field to new number listed. Where ever this fixed asset was used. The original fixed asset number would be copied to a new field in the Fixed asset Table inorder to reference history.
    You could attempt similar feature for chart of accounts.
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