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Departments

You can use the Department options to monitor costs and income to gauge the performance of different areas in your business. The more you know about your business, the more effective you can be at managing it.

Departments can also be used to track an area of your business such as:

• Business locations

• Regional sales or funds

  Note: All budgetary information is managed in your base currency.

Tip: If you don't assign a department to a transaction, Sage Accounts uses Department 0.

To edit departments

1. Company > Department > select a department > Department Record.

2. Enter a name, up to sixty characters, for the department.

3. If required, enter notes about the department, up to one hundred characters > Save.

   Tip: You can edit up to one thousand departments (0 - 999).

You can use the Memo tab to record additional information about the department, either as plain text or as an attachment.

Department budgeting

Department budgets are an excellent way to keep control of costs and income to assess the profitability of departments in your business.

Benefits of department budgeting include being able to:

• View the budget figures against your actual results.
• Enter a budget for the next year, referred to as the forecast year.
• Copy current year budget values to the next year. At the same time increase or decrease the copied values.
• View previous budget results for the past five years.
• Add information to the department record either as notes or attachments. To do this, open the record, click the Memo tab > Add Attachment.
• Generate various budget reports including a profit and loss or balance sheet report for each department budget.
  

For more information about budgeting, please refer to Budgeting methods.

To run a department report

1. Company > Department > Reports.

2. Click the folder for the type of report that you want to run, for example Profit and loss.

3. Select the report you want to run > select the action you want to take. Find out more.

4. If the Criteria window appears, amend as required > OK.

   Tip: To add the report to your Favourites select the report, then click the star icon next to the report.

Exporting Department data to Microsoft Excel

You can export the information in the Department window and the Department Activity window to Microsoft Excel. To do this, from within the relevant window, click To Excel. Find out more.