ANSWER ID:36822

You can assign departments to transactions in AccountRight by using Jobs or Categories. The easiest way to determine which function is best for your needs, determine how you want to report on your departments:

• Jobs can only be reported on profit and loss accounts - so you would use jobs if you only wanted to track the income and expenses for your departments.
• Categories can be reported on profit and loss accounts and on your balance sheet - so you would use categories to track the profitability of different departments, as well as provide an overview of their financial viability. 

Jobs

You can create a job to represent a particular department or profit centre. When you enter transactions which relate to that department, you can enter the job number for specific lines in the transaction using the Job field (available on most transaction windows).

There is a preference you can activate in your software to make it mandatory to specify a job for all transactions (Setup > Preferences > System tab).

You can generate several types of reports for each department/job, which you can find on the Accounts tab of the Index to Reports (Reports > Index to Reports > Accounts tab > Jobs sub-heading).

For more information on using jobs, press F1 on your keyboard while using AccountRight or see Tracking the profitability of profit centres using Jobs. 

Categories

Categories can be used on a per transaction basis, instead of a per-line basis like jobs. You need to turn on category tracking in your software preferences (Setup > Preferences > System tab). This preference also allows you to specify whether categories are mandatory or optional on all transactions. When the preference is activated, the Category field is available on all transaction screens.

There are several reports available for categories which you'll find under Reports > Index to Reports > Accounts tab > Categories sub-heading.

For more information on using categories, press F1 on your keyboard while using AccountRight or see Categoriessee the AccountRight help (Australia | New Zealand).