Implications of duplicate values in the chart of accounts or lists e.g. Class and Department
QuickBooks allows you to create duplicate values in the chart of accounts or lists e.g. Class and Department as long as the values are in separate parts of the hierarchy. So, for example you could create the following chart of accounts structure:
- Film Crew
- Salaries
- Expenses
- Acting Staff
- Salaries
- Expenses
Flash Reports allows you to create extremely flexible report structures by providing a custom Excel function as the building block to create reports. The balance which is returned is determined by the parameters of the function e.g. company, date, account etc.
You would enter the account name for the "Account" parameter of the function. But this presents a problem in the chart of accounts structure shown above. If you enter "Salaries", which Salaries account should Flash Reports return?
To get around this problem Flash Reports uses the Fully Qualified Name for any duplicate values that it finds. For the example above you would enter "Film Crew:Salaries" or "Acting Staff:Salaries" in order to specify the account you want to report on. Flash Reports will present these duplicate items using this Fully Qualified Name format in all applicable lists of values in the application.
While Flash Reports can deal with duplicate QuickBooks values as explained above we recommend that you rather ensure that all values are unique as this makes the process of building the functions and populating the parameters easier as you never need to be concerned about whether you must use the Fully Qualified Name for a particular value.
If you need to have duplicate values in the chart of accounts for some reason, you can consider using the account numbering feature in QuickBooks as account numbers must be unique.
For other lists like Class and Department there is no built-in numbering feature but adding your own numbering scheme as a prefix to the name is an easy way to ensure that all values are unique.