22 July 2010

Weekly Review: Use a Suspense Account as a Bridge

Every once in a while you run into something you can't quite do the way you want in GP and sometimes a little creativity can save a lot of customization. One little piece of creativity is to use a suspense account. There's nothing special about suspense account. It's not an account type, it's just an account that you always want it to be zero. You'll need a few examples to understand.

We use ADP for payroll and we know the cash requirements a couple days before we actually get the download file to import into GP. Well, it's a big hunk of cash so we go ahead and make the cash entry on Tuesday when we know the amount and we post the debit to a "Payroll Suspense" account to avoid cluttering up Accrued Expenses. Then on Thursday or Friday we upload the payroll detail via Integration Manager and instead of hitting the cash account, we hit the suspense account for the credit, thus clearing it out. It also means we get to do a simple integration into the GL without worrying about screwing up bank recs.


Also, there's no Integration Manager transaction for a Bank Transfer but you can import 2 bank checkbook transactions, a withdrawal and a deposit and use a suspense account in between to keep it all in sync. If you set the reference up right you even get to use Smartlists to find and out of balance transaction if you mess things up.


Is this unique to GP? Nope. Some days we solve things with technology and some days we solve it with technique. This is a technique thing.
 
Originally Posted by Mark at 10/13/2007 10:36:00 PM