General Ledger stores the totals of all transaction amounts for each account in records called fiscal sets. General Ledger automatically adds the fiscal sets you require when you post transactions to general ledger accounts, create new fiscal years, set up budgets, and otherwise create account data for current and previous years.
A fiscal set contains the following data:
Note: Each fiscal set stores 12 or 13 periods of accounting transaction summary data, depending upon whether the ledger uses 12 or 13 periods. In addition, each fiscal set has an adjustment period and a closing period.
Each single‐currency general ledger account has more than one fiscal set, because each fiscal set stores only one set of numbers for one fiscal year and an account can have different types of fiscal sets.
For a given single‐currency account, in addition to the current year’s transactions, you can maintain the following information in your General Ledger:
Two years of historical amounts plus the current year’s amounts make up three actual fiscal sets. Two years of historical quantities plus the current year’s quantities make up three quantity fiscal sets. The two budgets make up two budget fiscal sets. You have a total of eight fiscal sets for the account.
Multicurrency accounts have additional fiscal sets that hold amounts posted to the account in each source currency used with the account. Designating an account as a multicurrency account causes the system to create source‐currency and functional‐currency equivalent fiscal sets for the account as required.
If you selected the euro as your functional currency and specified a reporting currency, General Ledger maintains a fiscal set for storing the reporting currency equivalent of each period to let you display balances and net changes in the reporting currency.
For a quick reference to the types of fiscal sets and their codes, see Types of Fiscal Sets.
All accounts have an actual fiscal set. The amounts stored in the actual fiscal set are the totals of all transactions posted to the account. Actual fiscal set information appears on General Ledger reports such as the Income Statement and the Balance Sheet. When you post a batch of transactions, the system updates the actual fiscal sets.
If you want to store quantity data with general ledger accounts, you must first choose the option to maintain quantities on the G/L Options screen. Then, to maintain quantity data for individual accounts, you select the option to maintain quantities for each applicable account.
You enter quantity information as you enter monetary amounts in transaction batches. Each time you make a journal entry for an account for which quantities are maintained, General Ledger prompts you for a debit or credit amount and a quantity. When you post the batch, General Ledger updates the actual and the quantity fiscal sets.
You can maintain up to five budget fiscal sets (identified by the numbers 1 through 5) for each account. You decide how many of the five you want to use and the type of budget information you want to keep in each.
The provisional fiscal set contains amounts that have been provisionally (temporarily) posted to general ledger accounts.
General Ledger allows you to post amounts temporarily to accounts to test their effects on financial statements. When you post batches provisionally, General Ledger adds the transaction amounts to the provisional fiscal set instead of to the actual fiscal set, and keeps the batches available for further editing and posting.
When you post the batch permanently, General Ledger removes the effects of provisional posting. You can print financial statements that include provisional amounts, and check the results before posting the transactions permanently to ledger accounts. You can post batches provisionally only if you select the option to allow provisional posting.