Transactions

Description: The following chapters discuss transactions in InFocus. Transactions cover all G/L transactions, plus labor entries and personal transactions (time sheets and expense sheets). All the journals share some common operations, such as voiding a transaction. These operations will be discussed in the Common Journal Operations chapter.

Accounting journals support both batch and real-time entry.

Batch entry can only be used for new entries and is only available if enabled in global settings. Batch entry allows for a series of transactions to be entered under a batch number. Totals for the entries can be viewed prior to posting the batch. Until an entry is marked posted, it does not appear in any accounting or project management reports and cannot be part of any accounting process. While it is saved, it is not part of the system.

In real-time mode, entries are flagged as posted as soon as they are saved. This makes them available to all reports and operations in the system. Once a transaction is posted, all revisions to that entry are automatically recorded as real-time entries.

InFocus employs a unique auditing feature. Depending on the settings in Global Settings, it automatically determines if a change to a transaction line item should alter the existing data, or instead make a background reversing entry of the prior state of the line and insert a new line containing the changes. This technique makes corrections far simpler than a pure batch entry system and results in a more accurate audit trail. It also allows for adjustments to naturally be seen down to the line level.

The audit trail options are full or not full. When in full mode, any change to critical data (project, amounts, G/L accounts) creates an immediate reversing entry. When not in full mode changes to critical data only generate a reversing entry if they are also accompanied by a change to the G/L period. Every time a transaction contains one or more auto-reversals, a new revision number is displayed in the header of the transaction. You can scroll backwards to view prior revisions. Each line item will also have the revision number that they were created on. In normal operation, revisions are virtually transparent to the user. For instance, if an entry contained five lines, and you modified each line and saved the changes, the transaction would still show five lines with the new values.