Department, Branch & Project Tags
Every journal line can carry a department, a branch and a project. Tag the costs and income where they happen, then read the income statement for one department, one branch or one project, or split it across all of them.
A branch on the ledger is one of your warehouses, the same list you use for stock and tills. Departments come from Human Resources and projects from Projects. Every tag is checked against your own organization’s lists when it is saved.
Where The Tags Come From
Most lines are tagged for you, from the record that caused the posting. Nobody retypes them in Accounting.
| Posting | Tags it carries |
|---|---|
| Manual journal | Department, branch and project, chosen per line |
| Supplier bill | Department, branch and project from the bill |
| Expense | Department, branch and project from the expense |
| Petty cash voucher | Department and project from the voucher, branch from the float |
| Staff advance | Department and project, per expense line where given |
| Expense claim | The item’s project, otherwise the employee’s department |
| Payroll | Department: one posting per department, from each employee’s department |
| Till sale and till return | Branch of the till |
| Stock movement | Branch and project from the adjustment that moved the stock |
| Invoice revenue | Project from the invoice |
| Depreciation | Branch the asset currently sits in |
Tagging customer and supplier payments is being built. Until then they post without a tag and show in the Unassigned column described below.
Tagging By Hand
- Manual journals — Accounting → Manual Journals, new journal. Each line has Department, Branch and Project columns beside the account. Lines in one journal may carry different tags. The journal’s page shows the tags it used.
- Supplier bills and expenses — the form has Department, Branch and Project pickers. Branch starts as your own branch, if you have one; department and project start empty, because a cost belongs to what it was for, not to the department of the person typing it in.
Reading The Income Statement By Tag
- Open Accounting → Income Statement.
- Set From and To for the period. With no dates, it covers everything since the ledger began.
- To see one slice, choose a Department, Branch or Project. The filters combine, so you can ask for one project at one branch.
- To compare, choose Break down by and click Apply Filters. A second table lists each revenue and expense account with one column per department, branch or project, and a net income total under each.
Unassigned is the column for postings that carry no tag of that kind. It is shown rather than dropped, so the columns always add up to the whole statement and a breakdown never claims to explain more than it does. A large Unassigned column usually means bills or manual journals entered without tags.
Balance Sheet And Budgets
- The Balance Sheet takes an As of date and covers the whole organization. A balance sheet for one tag would only balance if every line of every entry carried the same tag, and a manual journal is free to tag its lines differently.
- GL Budgets can be set for one department, branch or project, and their actuals then count only lines carrying that tag. See GL Budgets.
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