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Presentation of Balances

Internally, HansaWorld Enterprise treats a Credit entry as a value that is to be subtracted from an account balance, while a Debit entry is to be added. Assets and expenses are therefore stored as positive values, while liabilities, equity and incomes are negative.

These internal calculation and storage methods are often impractical when it comes to displaying balances in reports on the screen or on paper. Therefore, you can use the Presentation of Balances setting to control how balances will be printed in reports. You can reverse the sign of each type of Account, so that, for example, liabilities, equity and incomes will be shown as positive values in reports.

On occasion, you may wish to exchange data with other accounting systems using conventions other than your default method. It is not unusual for the board, the bank, auditors, and tax authorities to request different presentations of the company's figures. You can solve this easily by changing the Presentation of Balances setting. You can do this at any time, e.g. between printing two reports of the same kind.

Open the 'Presentation of Balances' window by double-clicking 'Presentation of Balances' in the 'Settings' list.

As you can see, the window contains a set of check boxes. The five rows represent the five Account Types, and the three columns represent various reports, as follows:
Column 1
Balance Sheet, Profit & Loss, Accumulated Monthly P/L Report export

Column 2
Trial Balance report and export, Nominal Ledger report

Column 3
Monthly Balances export
A checked box indicates that the field will be presented with the sign opposite to the internal representation. An empty box means that the standard sign will be used (debits will be presented as positive numbers, and credits as negative numbers).

In the example shown in the illustration, values for Assets and Expenses will always be presented with the standard signs. Income, Equity and Liabilities will be presented with the opposite sign in the Balance Sheet and the Profit & Loss report, and with the standard sign in other reports.

Check the boxes in the window to select your settings.

Confirm your changes by clicking [Save] or revert to the previously saved setting by clicking [Cancel].