Create a New Company - Define Account Segments

This window appears if you select Build your own company on the Create a New Company - Chart of Accounts window. Use this window to indicate if you want to use Account Segments for your new company's chart of accounts.

Account Segments give you a powerful way to organize your general ledger accounts, by allowing you to create up to five segments for each account ID. You can then filter reports based on a specific segment or group of segments. This is valuable if you need to departmentalize your income and expense accounts and print departmentalized financial reports, or if you are a non-profit organization that needs to mark certain expense accounts for a particular level of restriction.

Show me an example of using account segments.

If you do not want to use account segments, select No, I do not want to use account masking. Click Next to continue New Company Setup.

If you want to use account segments, select Yes, I would like to use Account Masking. The fields below this option allow you to define up to five segment sections, their lengths and the separator to divide the segment from the segment following it. As you enter a description for a segment, the fields for the next segment will become available.

• Segment Description:Enter a description (up to 10 characters) for the segment. This description could be department, division, or any other designator for that segment of your Account ID. This description will appear on all windows that reference account segments. For instance, General Ledger report and Financial Statement filtering options.
• Length: Enter the length of the segment. For example, if this segment of the account ID is two characters in length, enter 2 in this field.
• Separator: Specify a separator between this segment and the segment following it (if any). The default separator is a hyphen (-), but you can select other values from the drop-down list. In addition, you can type in any other character as a separator, with the exception of the asterisk (*), question mark (?), plus sign (+), and a blank space.

As you enter values for the Length and Separator fields for each segment, Sage 50 updates the Account Structure field to the right and shows you how the Account ID is structured, with a capital X used to represent each space in the segment length. Moreover, Sage 50 updates the Total Account Length field, telling you how long the account ID is. The maximum length is 15.

After Create a New Company is complete and you are creating your chart of accounts, Sage 50 will expect the account IDs you enter to match the segmentation structure you create here. Sage 50 will allow you to create new account IDs that do not match the structure, but it will warn you when you try to save the new account.

If you should need to alter the account segments after New Company Setup is complete, you can do so on the General Ledger Defaults - Account Segments tab. To open this tab, select Maintain; General Ledger Defaults; General Ledger; Account Segments tab. Tell me more about this.

Click Next to continue New Company Setup. Sage 50 displays the Create a New Company - Accounting Method window.