About Company Departments

Company departments help organize income and expense data and provide a means to evaluate the profit and loss for a company. Departments and subsidiary accounts both arrange data in meaningful ways, but with a significant difference in how the data is used. While a single controlling account uses a set of subsidiary accounts tailored to the controlling account, income and expense controlling accounts share departments.

With departments in place, you can analyze your income and expenses. For example, to determine which departments are profitable, you can generate a departmental income statement. You can also view a department balance for either all ledger accounts or for a specific ledger account.

After you set up the controlling accounts and create your list of departments, you can add the departments to the controlling accounts. Because Sage 100 Contractor simultaneously updates departments to all controlling accounts, you can add departments, or change the department names or numbering structure at any time.

Important! Before you create departments, you must designate ledger accounts to accept departments. How?

You cannot transform a ledger account into a controlling account if that ledger account has had any activity or carries a balance. The ideal time to create departments is at the start of a new fiscal year after all account balances have been cleared. If necessary, however, you can create departments for a ledger account in the middle of the fiscal year. To do this, create a new controlling account to handle departments, and transfer the balance from the ledger account into the departments in the new controlling account.

Departments and subsidiary accounts both provide tools to evaluate the profit and loss for companies. Both arrange data in meaningful ways; however, there are significant differences in how the data is used. A single controlling account uses a set of subsidiary accounts tailored to the controlling account. In contrast, income and expense controlling accounts share the same set of departments, and each controlling account that uses departments has the same set of subsidiary accounts.