About Accounts

Accounts is the place to review data quality issues relating to specific general ledger accounts. These include potential duplicate accounts and dormancies. You can also track your suspense accounts, check where there are inverted balances and lastly, inspect where there is abnormal activity within certain accounts. This is a rich feature set that provides you with great insight into the health of your chart of accounts and transactions within those accounts. Let’s show you how it works.

The duplicate and dormant sections in accounts flag any duplicate or dormant accounts so that you can investigate if these may be erroneous or potentially fraudulent.

To get to the Duplicate accounts section, navigate to Review > Accounts > Duplicates, as shown in the picture.

Duplicate accounts look at your COA and perform an analysis based on names. You can review the account from here or take action as necessary.

Dormant accounts show all accounts that have not had activity for more than 3 months. You can review them and take action as necessary. To reach the Dormant accounts section, navigate to Review > Accounts > Dormancies.

If you no longer transact with these accounts, you may want to investigate why you have them in your books. You may want to archive these so that you don't have any account postings.

As with other sections of the Review tool, you can tick the box next to "Review" to dismiss them, and you can toggle on "Show reviewed" to see an audit log of reviewed accounts.

Syft's Suspense Accounts section can be reached by going to Review > Accounts > Suspense. Here, you can designate suspense accounts and monitor end-of-period balances.

Suspense accounts exist so as to separate ambiguous transactions from your organization's expected income and expenditure. By assigning ambiguous transactions to suspense accounts, you can find out more about these transactions and incorporate them in your general ledger appropriately. Common use cases include:

To configure a suspense account, click on Configure.

You can then select the accounts to display as well as the threshold. You will then see this suspense account appear as a card on your screen with an indication of whether it has exceeded the threshold.

If you click on this card, you will be redirected to the transaction list with the relevant transactions of which this account is comprised.

Keeping track of and regularly updating your suspense accounts is beneficial as it enables you to see which transactions need further investigation. Syft will then check that your suspense account is at 0 at the end of the month.

For clarification on ambiguous transactions, you can use Syft's Clarify tool. Simply select the ambiguous transaction and then click Clarify.

You will then be able to send an email to a client or team member asking them to clarify the transaction in question.

To find the Inverse section, navigate to Review > Accounts > Inverse.

Inverted Balances are detected by analyzing month-end balances for all accounts. Credit balances for debit-type accounts are considered anomalous. Similarly, debit balances for credit-type accounts are considered anomalous.

There is a tab for each element of the accounting equation. Click on each tab to see which accounts within that category have anomalous balances. We analyze balances for the 12 months before the end date set in the universal date selector.

To discover the anomalies identified, use the chevron to expand each account as necessary. You will then see each month that is anomalous and take action accordingly. If you are comfortable that the account should have an inverted balance, you can review the account by clicking on the checkbox alongside the account.

You can also hover over reviewed items to view the audit trail of which contacts have been reviewed, like so:

The toggle labelled "Show reviewed" allows you to see any accounts that have already been reviewed.

You can also exclude any accounts you don’t want to consider for anomalies. Perhaps you expect something unusual there so that you can exclude it with the drop-down menu. For example, you could exclude the exchange rate recon if you expect it to have both debit and credit balances.

Lastly, if you are a Xero user and hover over the account balance, you will see the icon indicating a deep link to Xero. If you click this button, Syft will take you to Xero, where you can view the underlying transactions within that account and make changes if necessary.

Syft’s Variances section is a powerful tool for identifying where account values at year-end vary from the average movement for the last 12 months. Syft also analyzes transaction volume and identifies accounts where the volume deviates from the average.

To reach this tool, navigate to Review > Accounts > Variances.

A variance is defined as a percentage deviation from the average movement value or average volume for the preceding 12 months. The percentage deviation can be set by clicking on ‘Manage Variance’ and then ‘Variance. Here, you can select different threshold options.

Under the ‘Exclusions’ tab, you can select accounts to be excluded from the analysis based on your knowledge of the accounts. This is useful if you anticipate certain accounts to have erratic behavior.

Use the chevron to expand each account. Here, you will see details about the average value as well as which months have deviated. You can also see the variance to the average.

Lastly, you have a visualization of the trend of account movements, which can help you review the accounts.

You can also use the blue buttons to drill down into the account for that month and see which transactions may have caused the variance. Moreover, you can use the review checkbox to tick off accounts as reviewed when you are comfortable with the account variances.

You can watch a more detailed video here:

Otherwise, we highly recommend enrolling in our Review Tool course for free. Enroll here.