Setting Default Journals and Pick Roots for Account Ledgers

After updating NewViews 2 or NewViews for Non-Profit Housing to version 2.33, you may notice a change in behaviour when adding entries directly to account ledgers. All entries added to account ledgers must be associated with a journal. In previous versions of NewViews, the default journal for that ledger was used if one had been set. If no default journal had been set for that ledger, the General Journal was used automatically.

In this version, you are prompted to select the journal to be used for the ledger entry if no default has been set versus automatically using the General Journal. A default journal for any ledger can be set quickly and easily following the steps below; once this is done, the prompt will no longer appear.

Note: If you post entries directly to more than one account ledger, you will need to set a default journal for each. Setting the default journal for any given workstation will not be reflected in any other workstation.

Setting Default Journals for Account Ledgers

  • When you add a new entry to an account ledger for which a default journal has not been set, you will be prompted to choose a journal. In this example, we are using the bank account ledger.

  • To prevent this prompt from appearing by setting a default journal, find an entry in the account ledger with the journal used most often for that ledger.

    In this example, let’s say we are in the habit of entering bank deposits directly on the bank account ledger. So we would find an entry with BD in the journal field and press [F12] to set it as a default.

  • Once the default journal has been set in this way, any new entry added to the account ledger will use that journal and the prompt will not appear.

    Of course, you can override the default journal at any time by pressing [F3] and choosing the desired journal from the pick list.

Setting Pick Roots

You can also set a pick root to restrict the list of journals that appears in the pick box. This is very useful for presenting more intuitive choices for novice users, and reducing posting errors overall.  In our bank account ledger example, we may want to limit the choice of journals to the following:  Bank Deposits (BD), Bank Payments (BP), Foreign/Domestic Transfers (FXT) and the General Journal (GJ). To do this:

  • Position in the Journal column and press [Ctrl]+[F11] to define the column.

  • On the right hand side of the prompt, click the down arrow to the right of the Pick Roots field.

  • Expand the Bank and General folders in the journal explorer to expose the four journals you want to identify as pick roots (BD, BP, FXT and GJ).

  • As you want to restrict the pick roots to journals in different folders, you will have to select each one separately. For the first selection, choose REPLACE  when prompted. For the remaining selections, choose APPEND to add them to the first selection.

  • Once you are done selecting pick roots, close the Define Columns prompt. Now, when you press [F3] to pick a journal for an entry added to this bank account, you be choosing from the 4 journals selected as pick roots.