Last updated 15 March 2024

Investigating Entity Differences

Some Of the nominals and ledgers used in this topic may be different to those in your chart of accounts.

For establishment/organisation's consisting of several entities, each location has an entity code prefix to their nominal codes, for example 10.

If a document is posted that debits one entity and credits another, this means that whilst the trial balance for all entities combined still balances, a trial balance for each entity individually would not balance. This is because one entity shows a debit but no corresponding credit, and the other entity shows a credit but no corresponding debit.

Sometimes, you may think you have made a typing error and use the change document function to amend the invoice so that all lines are coded to the same entity nominals. However, the document that was triggered by the intercompany rule still exists and consequently, the entities do not balance.

It can be difficult to identify and locate documents that are causing intercompany differences, but the following options help to narrow the possibilities:

Confirm that the difference is not as a result of transactions being hidden from view due to security restrictions (this would only happen if the trial balance was not run as a System Administrator).
A Trial balance is run on one period at a time to identify the time frame during which the imbalance arose. Once you know the period, run an detail enquiry on the 5700 Intercompany Control nominal for that period only. The transactions display the document number of the original transaction in User Field 2 (grouping by this field provides the total for each document). For more information, please see Running a Trial Balance and Running a Detail Enquiry.

Correcting intracompany or entity differences

To correct any differences, amend the applicable intercompany (INCO) document, setting all values to zero, or reverse the INCO using another INCO as the document type. Using an INCO document type stops the system automatically posting any subsequent INCO documents when the reversal is posted.

If you find you have made a mistake when posting, which is likely to affect the intercompany nominals, the best practice is to reverse and repost, rather than change the existing document. This ensures the intercompany postings are also reversed automatically.

It can be difficult to locate the documents that are causing the difference but there are a few things that you can do to narrow down the possibilities.

First, confirm that the difference is not down to transactions being hidden from view via security restrictions. Running the trial balance as the CUSTADMIN user ensures that all transactions are visible.
When running the trial balance, run it for one period at a time to work out when the difference arose.
When you know which period to search in, you can run a detail enquiry on the 5700 Intercompany Control nominal for that period only.
On the Detail Enquiry window, the INCO transaction(s) display the document number of the original transaction in User Field 2.
Group the account enquiry by User Field 2 by selecting and dragging the column header to the Drag a column header here to group by that column message, the total for each document that has generated an intercompany posting is displayed.

If you compare the original documents against their corresponding INCO document then this can help identify the differences.

The most common reason is where the original document has been amended after the initial posting. If you change the original document then the INCO document is not automatically updated.