You can set up default accounts that will apply automatically when you code your transactions. You can amend these defaults at any time.

How to access the default settings

Click the Settings tab.
Click System Settings.
From the system settings page, you can select the default accounts for the following:
- Retained Earnings
- Tax accounts
- Cash Sales and Expenses

Retained earnings account

The current period earnings balance (all P&L account balances) will flow into this account in the next period. This must be an account that falls under an Equity or Reserve classification.

📎NOTE: Changing this account will impact not only the current but also all prior periods.

Tax accounts

You need to select the nominal code you want to apply automatically when you select tax in your transactions. This can be when coding your bank transactions or Sales or Expense batch entries.

📎NOTE: Any changes you make will flow through these accounts for both future and existing entries across all periods. This is because the tax codes must be consistent across all entries within a period.

Default account for Cash Sales and Expenses

Select here the nominal code you want to use for the total/gross amounts entries whenever you post your Sales or Expense batches.

This usually is an AR/AP account.

📎NOTE: Unlike the tax account, making a change here will only apply to future batch entries. The change won’t affect the existing entries. If needed, you can still edit the existing entries manually or create journals.

Duplicate check

When importing cash sales or cash expenses from AutoEntry, AccountsPrep will automatically flag potentially duplicate entries by comparing Cash Sales/Expenses to already-posted Bank Receipts/Payments.

Date: You can here set the number of extra days that AccountsPrep will check for a duplicate. The system will then ignore any transactions outside that range.

For example, you need to allow more days to match a bank payment lodged several days after the invoice date.

Reference: Also, you can either Ignore or expect an Exact match for the reference field.