Analytic Accounting

Reading Cost/Revenue by Dimension

Analytic Account P&L

The Financial Reports course's "Analytic / Cost Center P&L" screen (Finance Insights) shows a full income statement re-cut by analytic account instead of by company-wide totals — see exactly how "Marketing" or "Project X" performed as if it were its own mini P&L.

Pivot & Group By

On the General Ledger, Budget, or Sales/Purchase Analysis reports, group by or filter on any analytic plan to slice the same underlying data by department, project, or cost center without needing a dedicated report for each dimension.

Consistency Is Everything

Analytic reporting is only as good as how consistently transactions are tagged. A single untagged vendor bill silently falls outside every department/project report while still counting in the company total — periodically run a filter for "Analytic Distribution is not set" on relevant journals to catch gaps before they distort a report.

Best Practices

• Set up Auto-Distribution Rules for your most common recurring vendors/products before going live — it saves far more manual tagging than fixing it after the fact.
• Review untagged transactions monthly as part of your close process.
• Keep the number of active, required plans manageable — every plan you require is one more thing every user must remember to fill in correctly.

A Second Way to Slice Every Transaction

Your Chart of Accounts answers what kind of transaction something is (Travel Expense, Product Revenue). Analytic Accounting answers a completely independent question — which part of the business it belongs to (which department, which project, which cost center, which product line) — without needing a separate GL account for every single department or project.

Core Concepts

Where You've Already Seen This

Every course that mentions "analytic account" — Projects (cost tracking), Timesheets (billable hours), Budgets (department/project budgets), Purchases and Expenses (cost allocation) — is using this same underlying system. This course covers the setup and reporting side directly.

Designing Your Dimensions

Creating a Plan

1. Go to Accounting > Configuration > Analytic Plans → Create.
2. Name it after the dimension it represents (e.g. "Departments," "Projects," "Cost Centers").
3. Plans can be nested (a parent plan with sub-plans) for hierarchical reporting, though most businesses keep plans flat and simple.
4. Set Default Applicability to control whether this plan is optional or required on relevant transaction lines.

Creating Analytic Accounts

Within a plan, go to Accounting > Configuration > Analytic Accounts → Create. Each one is a specific value under its plan (e.g. "Marketing" under the Departments plan, "Website Redesign" under the Projects plan — Projects created in the Projects app actually generate their analytic account automatically).

Designing Your Plans

• Keep plans genuinely independent — "Department" and "Project" are separate dimensions because a single project can involve people from several departments, and a department can work across several projects. Don't merge them into one plan.
• Don't create more plans than you'll actually use for reporting — every additional required plan adds a field someone has to fill in on every transaction.
• Archive analytic accounts you no longer use rather than deleting them, to preserve historical reporting.