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This text refers to program version 4.0  

Objects - in Hansa

Hansa supports the use of Objects, to allow your accounts to be classified and reported in several different categories or dimensions. Up to 30 Objects can be assigned to a row in a transaction: the Object field can contain up to 60 characters. When entering Objects, each Object Code is separated by a comma. It is recommended that Object Codes with at least two characters are used, placing a more usual limit of 20 Objects on each transaction row.

You can assign default Objects to Customers, Items, Suppliers, individual Invoices and Nominal Ledger entries. When an Object is assigned to a Customer, for example, Hansa will automatically assign that Object to all Nominal Ledger Transactions generated by Invoices made out to that Customer. This gives you excellent possibilities to report for example sales per Object. In general, Objects are tools to improve the internal cost accounting capabilities in your business. You can use Objects in Autotransactions to create automatic cost distributions to products or profit centres for certain cost types.

Objects may be used as selection criteria in many reports. For example, if you have several profit centres in your business, and use Objects to separate income and expenditure for each of these, you may produce separate profit and loss statements for each profit centre. You can also print a Nominal Ledger report that is restricted to a particular Object. The report will then only show the transactions for each Account that have been classified with the selected Object.

All objects in Hansa can span several years. This is a consequence of Hansa's continuous database, where the end of year is simply a user-defined reporting interval. The Object balances are thus automatically transferred from one fiscal year to the next. This gives you the ability to keep track of the budget and results of an Object (e.g. a building project) for several years.

An Object can also be closed, to prevent further postings to it. Working in the Object register (in the Nominal Ledger or the System module), switch on the Closed check box to close it. If you want to open the Object again later, you simply click in the box again to remove the check.

It is a good idea to experiment with the Objects, Object Types and the various reports.

Examples
The following Nominal Ledger Transaction shows the result of a Sales Invoice, where the Customer belongs to the "Unit A" Object and the Items belong to the "Cars" and "Trucks" Objects respectively. Each Item and Customer have thus been assigned an Object reflecting their position in the table illustrated at the beginning of this section.

The following two Profit & Loss reports show the Income Statement for two of the journal postings: those with the Object combinations "Unit A & Cars" and "Unit A & Trucks", respectively. Some cost transactions have been added to make the example more complete.

With a careful use of Object and Account definitions, Hansa allows you to allocate revenues and expenses in a logical way, in order to reveal the profitability pattern in the business. Most of the assigning of Objects is done automatically. Objects assigned to Customers, Suppliers and Items are automatically transferred to the Nominal Ledger Transactions.

Object Types
Objects that belong to the same type, e.g. departments or products, can be grouped together as Object Types. Several reports in Hansa can be produced for an Object Type.

In our example we have created the Object Types "PRODS" and "UNITS" (using the Object Types setting in the Nominal Ledger).

The following Objects are defined for the three Object Types:

All invoiced sales are recorded with an Object of the "LAND" Object Type (representing their country of origin). Here, we produce a Profit & Loss report for the "LAND" Object Type:

Similarly, ordering a report for an individual Account (the Nominal Ledger Report) and for one Object Type will list only Transactions for that Object Type. The Balance Sheet for the "LAND" Object Type will summarise the accounts receivable per country.

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