Set up Fiscal Authority: your general ledger

Setting up Fiscal Authority, your general ledger

Setting up Fiscal Authority means turning Skyline Nexus ERP's ledger from a working default into your own chart of accounts, default postings and fiscal calendar. It matters because every sale, purchase, payment, expense and payroll run in the system eventually lands on the balance sheet and the profit and loss through the account types, accounts and mappings you confirm here, so a mistake at setup repeats on every document after it.

This guide is for the owner or bookkeeper doing that confirmation in the first days after signing up, before the business records real transactions in earnest. It covers reviewing and extending the chart of accounts, setting default and category-level GL accounts, switching on automatic posting, creating the fiscal year, entering opening balances and proving the result with a trial balance.

Before you start

Most of Fiscal Authority is open to any user with the access accounting module permission, but a few screens are admin-only: Fiscal Periods needs the manage fiscal years permission, and Opening Balances is restricted the same way. If you are not the account owner, ask an administrator to grant these before you begin.

Decide two things before you touch a screen. First, your Financial year start month, set under Settings, Business Settings, on the Business tab: change it there, not in Fiscal Authority, because it decides the fiscal year the system suggests. Second, gather your closing trial balance or opening figures from your previous books or spreadsheet, because you will need a balanced set of debits and credits later in this guide.

What sign-up already built for you

You are not starting from a blank ledger. When your business verified its e-mail, Skyline Nexus ERP installed the Accounting module for you: a chart of accounts template chosen from your currency, the first fiscal year with monthly periods already generated, every default GL pointer already filled in, and Cash and Bank payment accounts already created and linked. For a Saudi riyal business the template carries VAT and GOSI accounts; for a UAE dirham business it carries VAT accounts; every other currency, including the euro and the Canadian dollar, gets a generic template with sales-tax accounts added so VAT or GST has somewhere to post from day one.

For that generic template the codes are fixed and worth knowing: Cash is 1101, Bank is 1110, Accounts Receivable is 1120, Accounts Payable is 2101, Inventory is 1140, Sales Revenue is 4101, Cost of Goods Sold is 5101, VAT Input is 1165, VAT Output is 2140, Retained Earnings is 3201. Your job in this guide is to review and extend that starting point, not to build it from nothing.

Reviewing and adding account types

Every account belongs to an account type, and the account type is what decides where a balance appears on the financial statements. Under Fiscal Authority, Chart of Accounts, Account Types you can see the types the install created and add your own with Add Account Type: Type Code, an optional Parent Type, Name (English), Name (Arabic), Classification (asset, liability, equity, revenue or expense) and Normal Balance (Debit or Credit).

The Report Classifications block on the same form is the part worth understanding properly, because it drives three reports at once: P&L Category (Cost of Goods Sold, Operating Expense, Other or Financial Expense) decides where the type sits on the profit and loss; Balance Sheet Liquidity (Current or Non-Current) decides its half of the balance sheet; Cash Flow Activity (Operating, Investing or Financing) decides its section of the cash flow statement. Get these three right once on the type, and every account you add under it inherits the correct placement automatically.

Adding accounts to the chart of accounts

Add individual accounts from Fiscal Authority, Chart of Accounts, Add Account. Account Identification takes a GL Code and the Account Type; Account Names takes the English and Arabic names; Account Properties sets the Account Nature, Posting or Heading, plus the Normal Balance and an optional Parent Account for a hierarchy.

Control Settings is where the account earns its behaviour: Is Bank Account and Is Cash Account flag treasury accounts, Is Control Account and Control Type (Accounts Receivable, Accounts Payable, Payroll, VAT / Tax, Inventory or Fixed Assets) mark sub-ledger accounts, Requires Cost Center and Requires Party force a dimension on every line, and Allow Manual Posting decides whether the account can ever appear on a manual journal. Only Posting accounts take entries; Heading accounts exist to group and subtotal them. The form shows an Opening Balance box, but it will not accept a non-zero figure here; opening balances are entered later, from the Opening Balances screen covered further down.

Default accounts and category overrides

Fiscal Authority, Settings opens a page with its own tab bar. General Settings, the first tab, holds the accounts every posting falls back to: Default Accounts (Cash, Bank, Accounts Receivable, Accounts Payable), Revenue & Expense Accounts (Sales, Cost of Goods Sold, Inventory, Expense, Retained Earnings), VAT Accounts (VAT Input, VAT Output), Asset & Depreciation Accounts and Closing Entry Accounts (Income Summary, Dividends, Unrealized Gain/Loss). Sign-up already filled these in from the codes shown earlier; check them against your own chart if you have added or renamed accounts.

The Account Mapping tab, next to General Settings, is where you go deeper. Product categories can each carry a GL Sales Account and a GL COGS/Purchase Account, and expense categories a GL Expense Account; set these and a single invoice's revenue and cost split by category automatically, giving you a margin by category straight out of the ledger. Leave a category unmapped and its documents will not silently land in a default account: an expense in an unmapped category simply fails to post, which is the system telling you to finish the mapping rather than misstating your accounts.

Turning on automatic posting and approvals

Auto-Post Settings, further down the General Settings page, has one toggle per document family: Auto-post Sales Transactions, Auto-post Purchase Transactions, Auto-post Payment Transactions, Auto-post Payroll Transactions, Auto-post Expense Transactions, Auto-post Depreciation Entries, Auto-post Asset Disposal Entries and Auto-post Material Issues to GL. If your business came from self sign-up these are already switched on, so treat this section as a check rather than a first activation: confirm each toggle matches what you actually want posting automatically before you start trading in earnest.

The Approval Settings card controls how a manual journal moves from draft to posted: a checkbox for Require Approval for Journals, a currency-denominated Approval Threshold, and a checkbox for Auto-post on Approval. There is no separate field for a second approval level; an amount at or above exactly twice the Approval Threshold always needs a second approval in code. The threshold defaults to 10,000 in your base currency when the module installs, which is worth revisiting once you know the size of a typical entry your business posts.

Setting the fiscal year

Sign-up already created your first fiscal year, with monthly periods, starting at the Financial year start month you set on the Business tab. You will see it, and can create the next one, under Fiscal Authority, Fiscal Periods: New Fiscal Year asks for a Fiscal Year Name, Start Date, End Date and Period Type, Monthly or Quarterly, and generates the periods for you; a year saved without periods offers Generate Periods afterwards.

Every posting, automatic or manual, looks up the fiscal period that covers its date, and is refused with No fiscal period found for the selected date if none exists. Make creating next year's fiscal year part of your calendar well before the current one ends, not a scramble on the last working day of December.

Worked example: opening balances for a new business

A bakery in Ontario finishes the steps above and is ready to bring its old books into Skyline Nexus ERP. Under Fiscal Authority, Opening Balances it lists its accounts with GL Code, Account Name, Type, Normal, Debit and Credit, and enters its position as at the cut-over date, in Canadian dollars: Cash 3,200 debit, Bank 18,500 debit, Inventory 6,300 debit, Loan Payable 12,000 credit, Owner's Capital 16,000 credit.

Total Debits reads 28,000, Total Credits reads 28,000, the Difference shows zero, and Save Balances is accepted. A set that does not balance is rejected outright, so if your Difference is not zero, recheck your old trial balance before you try to force a save. Accounts Receivable and Accounts Payable are deliberately left off this screen: customer and supplier opening balances are entered per contact instead, so each one ties to its own sub-ledger record rather than a single lump sum on the control account.

• Cash 3,200 debit / Bank 18,500 debit / Inventory 6,300 debit = 28,000 total debits
• Loan Payable 12,000 credit / Owner's Capital 16,000 credit = 28,000 total credits
• Check: 28,000 debits minus 28,000 credits = 0

Common mistakes and how to fix them

Most Fiscal Authority setup problems trace back to one of a handful of habits. Catching them before your first live document saves a clean-up later.

• Wrong Normal Balance on a new account: it flips the sign on every report; fix it while the account still has no journal lines, because it cannot be safely changed once it does
• An expense or product category left unmapped: its documents fail to post rather than landing somewhere wrong, so treat a posting failure as a mapping checklist, not a bug
• Marking a control account, such as receivables, Allow Manual Posting and Requires Party at the same time: the manual Journal Entry screen has no field to choose a customer or supplier, so any manual line on that account is rejected outright
• Opening balances that do not foot: re-total your old trial balance, including any rounding, before re-entering it
• Forgetting next year's fiscal year: create it well before the rollover, or every document dated in the new year keeps its date but its journal is refused until you do
• Assuming Auto-Post Settings needs switching on: for a self sign-up business it is already on; check the toggles rather than assuming they are off

Checking your setup with a trial balance

Once your accounts, mappings and opening balances are in place, run Fiscal Authority, Reports, Trial Balance with View Mode set to Simple and Show Zero Balances off. The Difference column should read zero; if it does not, your opening balances or a manual correction are out of step and need tracing before you post a single live transaction.

Run the Balance Sheet the same day. Because it is built from the same account type classifications you set earlier, a wrong Balance Sheet Liquidity flag or an account under the wrong type shows up immediately as an asset or liability in the wrong half of the statement, or as the explicit warning Balance Sheet is not balanced if something more serious is out of place.