Creating and Rebalancing Ledger Period Totals

Use the Rebalance Ledger Period Totals utility to create period total records that contain the sum of the transactions for a particular period.

Creating period totals improves the speed with which reports can run, because the system calculates account balances at the time the report is printed. It does not store totals. To get a total, it must sum up ledger transactions for an account up through the required date.

When calculating a balance, the system first sums up the period total records that apply, and then adds in the ledger transactions that close the gap between the end of an accounting period and the requested date.

For example, you may request an account balance on 4/15, but the accounting periods end on 3/31 and 4/30. The system sums up period total records through 3/31 and ledger transactions from 4/1 through 4/15 to arrive at the total.

This utility processes all ledger transactions and creates balance totals per period, for each account. This information is then used for General Ledger reporting.

Run this utility if you suspect that the period totals are not correct, because it takes some time if there are a lot of ledger transactions.

You may also want to run this utility when you have sort methods that need to be maintained only for a short period of time.

For example, suppose you have defined a sort method for a financial report that is needed for year end closing. Maintaining this report throughout the year would be an unwanted performance hit for eleven months. You would leave the index inactive for eleven months and when the time came to run your report, you would run this utility for this one sort method and select the Active Only check box. Once you are done with your year end reporting, you would go to the Period Sorting Methods form and deactivate the sort method until next year.

When you run this utility, the Index Active check box for each sort method in the specified range is not selected, preventing other programs that are run by other users from looking at these period total records and retrieving a potentially incorrect or partial amount. When the utility completes successfully, the Index Active check box is then selected.

Note: If the utility does not run to completion (because, for example, of a power outage or system failure), the Index Active check box will not be selected, and the account balance calculation will be slow because the system cannot reliably look at period totals. Re-run this utility, and do not select the Active Only check box.

Separate Debit and Credit Totals

If you have selected Separate Debit and Credit Totals on applicable activities and reports, the Rebalance Ledger Period Totals utility manages the calculation of these totals. If cancellation posting is also enabled, this utility includes negative-signed debits and credits in its calculations. When cancellation posting is not enabled, separate debit and credit totals are determined using only the positive or negative state of the original transactions. For more information, see About Cancellation Posting for Single-Entry Accounting.

Note: Transaction compression, such as the Mass Journal Posting activity or the Compress General Ledger Transactions utility, eliminates the detail necessary for tracking separate debit and credit amounts and for providing the treatment for cancellation notation. The Rebalance Ledger Period Totals utility records only a single debit amount or credit amount when the ledger uses transaction compression.