Special Accounts & Special Fund Accounts

The Special Accounts (SPEC) page supplies the majority of default accounts for document processing.  The tabs on the SPEC page along with several others in the Fixed Asset, Inventory, Treasury, and Accounts Receivable areas are used only when a particular functional area is used, meaning there is no need to complete tabs and fields that will not be used.  SPEC is one of the critical setup pages that must be completed before any accounting documents are processed to enable users with the ability to only enter one side of an accounting transaction. Which accounts default when, is controlled by configuration that is detailed in the ”Accounting Model” section later in this guide. Review of that section after the current one is imperative in the complete understanding of defaulting accounts.

Setup on SPEC occurs once and often does not change after that.  Records on SPEC are unique by Fiscal Year in Advantage Financial. The New Year Table Initialization (NYTI) batch process exists to populate create records with values for a coming year.

Some features of SPEC will resemble those in previous versions of CGI Advantage Financial, while many will be new.  Although SPEC has one page code that is found through the Page Search feature, you will find the single entry leads actually into different pages for different functional areas. These areas are represented on the left-hand menu of the page for easy navigation.

Most SPEC accounts contain a field for both a primary element code and a sub element code followed by a flag that will allow overrides. Although certain default accounts are available on other pages, these override flags do not control them. The override flags are specifically for the Special Fund Accounts (SPECFUND) page, which is used when default accounts should vary by individual Fund codes. When a Fund is to have a different default account, it is only necessary to complete that one account field and not all fields on SPECFUND. The corresponding override flag on SPEC must be checked in order for the SPECFUND default to be used.

One advantage to using SPECFUND is that a certain Fund code can use a different default balance sheet account (BSA) than all other funds because they need a different BSA name for reporting reasons. However, the more likely reason is that the fund needs a BSA that has a different Level of Control setting than the one used system wide.  For example, the BSA uses system wide can never get a contrary balance for the account type, but for that fund it has to be allowed. That Level of Control field is found on the Balance Sheet Account (BSA) page.

For brevity, when the term SPEC is used from this point forward, it refers to SPEC and SPECFUND unless otherwise noted.

All accounts are optional unless a SOPT option setting has made the value required. If a document is validated with a balance sheet account posting code and no account defaults, an error will be issued, preventing the document from accepting. Not every posting code will or should have a default account as some are intended to be used on documents where users manually enter a balance sheet account.

In all cases, a value entered in a SPEC field must be valid on the specific Chart of Account (COA) reference table for the Fiscal Year of the SPEC record. Validation statements made about a type of BSA refer to the Account Type field on the BSA chart of account table. Validation statements made about the memo account status refer to the Memo Account flag on the BSA table. As many default accounts contain a primary and a sub account, listings below contain only one entry for the pair of fields.

The following tables provide you with the available options and descriptions for the various functional areas on SPEC and SPECFUND. 

This section includes the following areas: