The Auto Insert option is designed to speed up the entry of Accounts for organisations with large a chart of accounts that require duplication of Nominal records for Cost Centre and/or Divisional reporting. It also allows you to generate automatically the associated Analysis Codes in the Sales and Purchase Ledgers.

If you use the Advanced Nominal Ledger system, you will not be able to use Nominal Ledger Categories or the Auto Account feature.

This is not a problem, the use of segmented accounts does away with the need to use categories for analysis and the Chart of Accounts builder removes the need for the Auto Account builder.

The Auto Insert feature makes use of the Nominal Ledger Categories which can have up to 84 levels in Dimensions but only 4 levels in Dimensions Lite.

As the Account Codes are created by concatenation, the result can become very long.

For this reason, if using this feature, try to make the elements as short as possible.

E.g. if all 8 Categories contained 3 character Codes, this could result in an account Code of 24 characters.

Clicking Auto Insert displays a window which will list the Codes and Short Names for all of the Nominal Category Records that you have entered.

The Categories have an implied hierarchy of Category 4 within Category 3, within 2, within 1; however, although you do not have to use all Categories for each Account, great care must be taken to ensure that the Account Numbers that would result from the selection are unique.

The Category Headings can be changed on the Category Edit window.

Nominal Accounts must be attached to a Major Heading, and if installed a Currency. The system Auto Inserts new Accounts for one Major Heading and one Currency at a time.

You can select the pattern of Accounts that you wish to create by clicking on the entries to highlight them.

You would not normally omit one Category from the selection, as this could easily result in duplicated or confusing Codes. However you can easily omit the 'lower' level Categories, if you do not need to analyse the detail down to that level.

When designing your chart of accounts, great care should be exercised over the Category Codes and Short Names. The use of alphabetic Codes can make the resulting Nominal Accounts more meaningful, and easier to use, and less likely to cause errors, for example, alternating numeric and alpha elements can produce a code that is instantly recognisable e.g. 1EDIN787SPKR is easier and safer to use than 11441313416718.

Keeping the lengths of Codes and Short Names within a Category the same will mean that, when listed, the elements are aligned under each other.

Major Heading - Sales Pops up the window of available headings and your selection is displayed as part of the button text.

Currency Is selected in the same way as Major Headings.

Will display a New Account List of all of the Account Records that will be created from this selection, you can then review this list.

This menu provides the option of generating an Analysis Code in the Sales or Purchase Ledgers for each new Nominal Account created.

If this option is taken the new Analysis Code will be a duplicate of the Nominal Account Code that it is created from.

Provides the option of leaving blank the Account Name field for Auto Inserted Accounts, so that it can be entered manually, instead of generating a name by concatenating the Category Short Names.

This window lists the Nominal Accounts suggested by your selections on the Auto A/c window. You will notice how the Code and Name have been created by concatenating the eight Short Names together, separated by spaces.

Tabbing will move the cursor through the list so that you have the opportunity to change or overwrite the default name that has been generated. The list is re-sizable and can scroll so that if you have generated hundreds of new Accounts you can view them all in turn.

Will print a report detailing the Accounts if you need to check them in more detail before updating them permanently.

Will cancel the Auto Insert instruction, and ensure that none of the Accounts generated are written to the Data set.

Individual Nominal Accounts can be excluded from updating by selecting them in the list and double clicking, this will change the update flag to NO, and vice versa.

If an Account is not required, it can be switched to NO (or to YES if it is already set to NO) by highlighting it and clicking on the Line switch. The All switch will change all of the update flags to NO, or YES with each alternate press.

Will display a message to ensure that you wish to go ahead. The message shows the number of Account records that will be generated.