The first line shows any balance that might have been brought forward from the previous year.
The account items are displayed in date sequence starting with the first month of your accounting year.
Each line has the following fields:
Statement Number. All items that have been ticked-off against a Bank or Charge statement will have the number of that statement shown in this column.
Reference. Any two characters that you may want to use to denote a particular type or source of item, eg a cheque number, or AM to denote an American Express charge.
Description. To tell you what this accounting item is. In addition, you may see some indicators after the description:
A % sign at the end of the line indicates an item on which VAT has been calculated.
A ? sign indicates an invalid VAT rate has been selected for this item.
A @ sign indicates that this item is entered in a foreign currency at a fixed rate and that the Fixed Rate option has been checked in the Account Item options.
A ® sign indicates you have checked the Have Receipt box when entering the item and that the Show Receipt option has been checked in the Account Item options.
Debit and Credit. If you have selected the Bank format option, the headings of the debit and credit columns reflect the type of accounting items you would expect to find in each account:
INCOME Expenses / Receipts
EXPENDITURE Expenses / Receipts
FIXED ASSETS Acquired / Disposed
SECURED LIABILITIES Repaid / Owed
CURRENT ASSETS Acquired / Disposed
Bank A/c Receipts / Payments
CURRENT LIABILITIES Repaid / Owed
Charge A/c Paid / Charged
CAPITAL Deficit / Surplus
RESERVES Paid / Set Aside
Balance. All debits are added and credits are subtracted giving a running subtotal after every item in the account.
If CR appears immediately after a value in this column, it shows that the balance of the account at this point was in credit. If this is a Bank account, a CR balance means that you are overdrawn!
If you click the column header buttons, you can sort the display into the ascending or descending sequence of the column selected. (Clicking the button the first time selects ascending sequence, the second time selects descending sequence)
You may find that it is particularly useful to group together all your highest items of expenditure when you are reviewing your performance against a budget that you have set.
The push-button functions let you carry out all actions necessary to review and update the account.