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.

Getting the Right Tag Onto Every Line

Manual Distribution

On any transaction line that supports it (a sale order line, an invoice/bill line, an expense, a timesheet entry), open the Analytic Distribution widget and assign one analytic account per active plan, or split a single line across several accounts by percentage (e.g. 60% Marketing / 40% Sales for a shared cost).

Automatic Distribution Rules

Go to Accounting > Configuration > Analytic Distribution Models to define rules that pre-fill the distribution automatically based on conditions like:

• Partner or Partner Category – e.g. every bill from a specific vendor defaults to a specific cost center.
• Product or Product Category – e.g. every software subscription line defaults to "IT."
• Account – e.g. every line hitting a specific GL account gets a specific department by default.

Rules are evaluated in Sequence order, and the distribution can always still be overridden manually on a specific line — rules set the default, not a hard lock.

Where This Fills In Automatically Already

• A Project's tasks and timesheets tag their own project's analytic account automatically.
• A Sales Order line for a service tied to a project inherits that project's analytic account.
• Expenses tagged with a project/task carry that analytic account through to accounting.

Auto-Distribution Rules matter most for the transactions that don't already have an obvious home — general vendor bills, overhead expenses, and anything not tied to a specific project by nature.

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.