Department Masking (Getting Started)

Sage 50 offers a powerful feature called masking that helps you departmentalize your financial statements. To take advantage of this feature, you need to set up your account numbers in a special way.

Say you want to set up a company that comprises a main branch and a remote branch, with two departments: a sales and a service department. You could establish a seven-character account number, with the fifth character representing location and the sixth and seventh representing departments.

You could use an M or an R code for the two branches (for Main and Remote branch). You could use 01 and 02 for the department numbers (leaving room for up to 99 departments in the future). Then you would enter each normal account number in your chart of accounts four times, with each combination of location and department codes:

• Account #--M--01
• Account #-- R--01
• Account #--M--02
• Account #--R--02

When you order a report such as the General Ledger report, you are prompted for the Department mask. To have this report only show totals for the main branch, enter ****M**. (Asterisks are wild-card characters; they represent any other possible character.) To have the report only show totals for Department 02, you would enter *****02. To show totals for the Remote branch, Department 01, enter ****R01.

Masking offers a lot of possibilities. You know your needs, so use your imagination when setting up your chart of accounts to take advantage of this powerful feature.

You can set up Account Segments to use for masking General Ledger reports and Financial Statements (Sage 50 Premium Accounting and higher).