Let’s talk about Journals Manager. Would love to hear advice/best practices/tips on using the Journals Manager. We use it monthly in Prophix consolidating 12 divisions and it works great with the exception of it’s handling of journal entries that impact the balance sheet. For example if we make a journal entry hitting a balance sheet account for $100 in June, in July that $100 is gone. There was no journal entry to remove it or prior entry that was reversing.
Our current work around is to do an info flex to move prior month journal entry adjustments to the current month for the balance sheet accounts and add those to any other activity in that account for the month. Please tell me someone has a better solution.
Currently, we do not utilize this feature but have a meeting scheduled with our success manager to incorporate more EOM processes, reporting, and responsibility within the software.
I would love to know your prior experiences with the software in relation to EOM as this is a new feature within Prophix we are excited to explore.
The journals manager is a useful tool, we use it for EOM intercompany and Capital adjustments but are working towards automating the process within Prophix with a process that is scheduled.
Although we haven’t utilized the journal manager tool thus far, it’s becoming evident that the Journals Manager could prove to be invaluable, particularly for streamlining intercompany and capital adjustments. We’re eagerly anticipating the prospect of automating this process within Prophix
I would love to learn more about this. We do backend allocations and it would be great if Prophix could do them automatically. I would love to hear more about how everyone else is using it.
Hi Larry - We use Journals Manager for our eliminations process and some recurring topsides. It makes since why you are having issues with P&L vs balance sheet behavior in Journals Manager. You have to keep in the mind while it looks and feels like an journal entry, you are not booking a JE in an ERP system. In Prophix you have to understand your account member properties “Time conversion” settings are different for P&L vs Balance sheet accounts. P&Ls are set to “Sum” and Balance sheet accts are set to “last (Including Empty)”. When you load balance sheet data to the month of June, it will only impacts June. You don’t see it pull thru in July. However, you load P&L to June, that data will trickle thru to july in the YTD …and thru the rest of the year. Using Journals Manager to load data really is no different than loading data to Prophix via a template or data view or import or DIS or setvalue formula.
What’s cool about Journals manager is that it can be organized like a journal entry with debits and credits and you can feel good when you see the entries balance (insert accountants cheering!). If those debits and credits along with where the data comes from are ‘consistent and repeatable’ you can ‘automate’ the prefilling of the amounts by defining cube values where you want it to get the data for the entry. (that is, if the data is accessible in prophix) And then you can copy forward from period to respective period that you want impacted. In your case, you want $100 from June to impact July, then you need to duplicate the JE from June to July… and each month you want that $100 to hit the balance sheet.
Hope that helps!
Thank you so much for the detailed response. It seems that some of my problem is not fully understanding how the time conversion settings work within Prophix. Thank you for such a great explanation. The eliminations work flawlessly, we had an amazing implementation team that helped me set all the elims. up to pull from the cubes automatically.
My question now would be you say to “duplicate the JE from June to July”. What if that entry (in our case) does not need to be duplicated each month and it was just a June entry into Prophix Journals Manager Debit to a P&L, Credit to a BS account. When I load my data in from my ERP for July it is like that JE never took place. Prophix doesn’t recognize that June JE to a BS account as a transaction that needs to stay unless I remove it with an additional entry. I could repeat the JE for July but then my impact to my P&L is too much, but my BS would be correct again. That is my issue with the journals manager. I cannot get it to treat a BS account like a BS account, it does the entry for June but then when July arrives it is like that JE never took place.
Then that puts me back to where we currently are. I have an Infoflex that looks at prior month BS accounts for any JE’s done in Journals Manager and pulls those forward to the current month. This must be ran each month.
I recommend considering the reversing functionality within the Journals Manager. We discovered during implementation needing to do this on certain of our entries that impact a Balance sheet and P&L accounts within the same entry. Otherwise we had an unbalanced entry or we were double dipping the P&L. In our case, we check the ‘reversing’ box on the row with the P&L account only. We are a quarterly reporter and only book the JE in March, June, Sept & Dec. We have a note within the entry to remember to uncheck the box in December. Otherwise it will haunt in the subsequent Q1 reporting! Attached is a snip of our Journal to help illustrate.
