ALERE GENERAL LEDGER MODULE

ALERE is a real time system and it starts with the General Ledger. Anything you do that affects the general ledger immediately generates a journal entry and is posted to the GL. That means your financial information is always up-to-date as of your last keystroke. It also means that you will never again have to endure tedious month end closings! In fact, other than printing key financial reports at your convenience, there is nothing you have to do to close a period!

The COA, or Chart of Accounts, is displayed using what we call "Treevision". Treevision works like Widows Explorer. Just click to open and close different levels. You can create you entire COA right on the screen just by right clicking and adding or editing accounts.

The accounts can be alphanumeric and have up to six segments. In fact, by double clicking on accounts you can drill down right to the original document that created a journal entry!

To help you speed up the entry of a COA or duplicate one from another company, you can export the COA to Excel and then import it into a different company.

An easy-to-use budgeting process is built into the GL Chart of Accounts. For users requiring a more complex budgeting process, Excel can be used and compared against your COA in a number of very sophisticated ways.

ALERE General Ledger supports integration with the F9 Professional and BizNet Software to support those occasions when you would like custom extended analysis of your financial results.

Default rules for what accounts are to be used for common transactions are easy to set up and maintain on a single page. For those GL transactions that are dependent of who the customer is, or what group they belong to, or their location, or a specific item, or a group of items, or any of the other special circumstances that can define what GL account to use, custom rules can be set up and tested.

For those cases where, for example an electricity bill, should be shared among several departments, you can establish templates to use. Those templates can help you to do other distributions like inventory adjustments, supplier purchases, rent distributions, etc. You can even set the templates up so that the amounts can be distributed manually among the GL accounts.

Entering a journal entry is designed to be fast and flexible and recurring and auto reversing entries can be established. You can even enter unbalanced pending entries that can be reviewed and released at a later date!

Up to to 99 periods can be set up for any date range as long as there is no overlapping of gaps in the period dates. Since periods are automatically closed, you can control the number of grace days allowed to make postings to a period before a password is required. You can also control how many periods in the future postings are allowed to prevent those entries where a wrong year is accidently entered.

There is a yearend closing required that zeros out revenue and expense accounts but you can do it anytime at your convenience. It takes only moments to do and can be easily reversed if necessary.

A "Closings" screen shows the status of the periods and years and even displays whether or not key financial reports have been printed and if they are up to date.

Since one installation of ALERE can manage many separate companies, there is a multiple company consolidation function where you can select from a list which companies to merge for the purposes of reporting. The function will product consolidated Balance Sheets and Income Statements without any need to artificially create another company.

In addition to the the normal complement of financial reports you would expect in an accounting package, ALERE comes with some very advanced reporting capabilities. For example, there are 12 month Balance Sheet and Income Statement comparisons and any period/year can be compared to any other period/year. Since the system is date-based as opposed to period based, you can even have Income Statement reports that compare any range of dates to any other range of dates. For example: Last year's second quarter to this year's second quarter. Even the Cash Flows report gives you complete control over which GL accounts to include for the type of analysis you are doing.

All reports can be printed, sent to the screen, saved as a PDF, or even have the raw data exported to Excel.