Weekly Dynamic:Unit Accounts

 We've looked at Fixed and Variable Allocation accounts and now it's time for Unit Accounts. Strictly speaking, Unit Accounts are not financial accounts. They hold non-financial data that is still important to the company. Typically this would be items like headcount, square footage, etc. They can be entered and reported on and they can be used with allocation accounts to split entries based on the units.
Setting up unit accounts is easy. Cards->Financial->Unit Account gets you in. From there you enter an account number, description, and number of decimal points. You also select which series to apply them too. Pick all series unless you have a really good reason not to. Leaving out a series will come back to bite you unless you're very consistent because these account will be missing from the lookups in the series you didn't include.
Keep in mind that you can also budget against unit accounts.
Transactionally, a unit account functions like an asset account. Debits increase, credits decrease and it doesn't clear at year end. If you want to reset a unit account at year end you'll need to do a clearing entry.
Unit account transactions in the GL are one-sided entries. Because they're not financial accounts, they don't have to balance. Yes this freaks some people out the first time they see a unit transactions. The "Unit" is a measure or fraction of 1. Whatever you designate it to be (1 sq ft, 1 individual, 1000 ads). It may be helpful to include a unit of measure description in the account name if it's not obvious.
Unit accounts are pretty straightforward but powerful. Because they are accounts, FRx can see them and can use them. We use this to report headcount by department on our internal financials. Happy Headcounting!