Enabling Branching

Branching is an organizational level of grouping in e-automate. Branching has been set up to affect your income statement accounts (income, expense, cost of goods sold), meaning that any transaction that affects any of your income statement accounts will have a branch designation associated with it when posted to the General Ledger. Additionally, you can assign a branch at the line-item level on a sales order, sales invoice, and RMA order transaction.

When you enable branching, you can run several reports by branch or harvest information from e-views by branch. Balance sheet reports cannot be run by branch, but you can run an aged accounts payable and accounts receivable report by branch.

With branching enabled, you can also configure e-automate to allow a user to see only the information associated with the user's assigned branch. You configure this functionality by adding the e-automate-created user to the Users tab when creating a branch. When the user logs in to e-automate, the user only sees data associated with the user's assigned branch.

Getting to the TransactionGetting to the Transaction

On the Tools menu, select Options to open the Options window.

In the left pane, double-click on Company.

In the left pane, select Departments & Branches.

Basic InformationBasic Information

In the right pane, check the Use branching checkbox. When checked, your company will be able to use branching. Branching is another organizational level for grouping within e-automate. Branching is only reportable on an Income Statement.

To prevent users from different branches within the company from viewing each other’s information, check the Show data from only user assigned branches checkbox. When this box is checked, these users can only see information that pertains to their branch. For example, if you have Branch A with users 1, 2, and 3 and Branch B with users 4, 5, and 6, then users 1, 2, and 3 cannot see Branch B’s information and vice versa. When left unchecked, all users will be able to see information pertaining to all branches.

Note: This field is only available when the Use branching checkbox is checked.

Check the Use multiple balance sheets checkbox to create balance sheet groups to which you can assign your branches. You can assign a single branch to a group or multiple branches to group. A single balance sheet can be printed by e-automate for each group you create. The balance sheet reflects the account values for a branch or the sum of all branches assigned to the group.

Note: This field is only available when the Use branching checkbox is checked.

The first time you check the Use multiple balance sheets checkbox, the system displays the Edit Balance Sheet Group window. Using this window, do the following:

In the Number field, enter the name of the balance sheet group.

In the Name field, enter the name of the balance sheet group.

In the Intercompany due from account field, use the lookup to select the intercompany from account.

Note: If you have not set up any intercompany accounts, you can do this now. See the topic Enabling and Configuring Balance Sheet Groups for instructions on how to create intercompany accounts.

In the Intercompany due to account field, use the lookup to select the intercompany to account.

Click the [OK] button to close the Edit Balance Sheet Group window.

Completing the TransactionCompleting the Transaction

Click the [OK] button to save your changes and to close the Options window.

Note: If you made any changes, e-automate displays an Attention window, indicating that all users must restart e-automate in order for these changes to take effect. Do the following:

Click the [OK] button to acknowledge the message.

Restart e-automate so that these changes will take effect.

If you are running e-agent, restart e-agent as well.

Note: When branching is enabled, e-automate displays a Branches menu option under the Accounting menu as well as branch identifiers in several areas of the product. To identify your additional branches, see the Creating Branches topic. For additional information on branching, refer to the following topics:
Additional Info - Windows Impacted by Branching
Additional Info - Assigning Branches to Line Items on Orders and Invoices