Macy’s $150M+ Accounting Falsification

Dear Clients,

My favorite accounting topic to discuss is the importance of Validating the Balance Sheet and Validating the Validating Reports—as it’s the financial control most lacking in mid-tier business operations—so I can’t pass up citing a recent failure from a Fortune 200 company on exactly this point…

Initially reported in late November, a Macy’s employee systematically and purposefully misclassified shipping expenses to the balance sheet instead of cost-of-goods, inflating income (and tax liability!) by more than $150M over three years. As a “material corporate event,” Macy’s filed the required Form 8-K with the Securities and Exchange Commission in December, restating historical financials (and thus earnings per share!) for 2022, 2023 and YTD 2024. Certainly an embarrassment for a company with a single-letter designation on the NYSE, which could have been avoided with regular Validating the Balance Sheet and Validating the Validating Reports (that link lists 21 built-in reports to help you validate)… So, how’s your validation procedures?!

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Lots of good info on the year-end closing process in our newsline last month and in the two Tech Notes below. And here’s our annual List of Things to Do RIGHT NOW:

1. Lock your January 2024 fiscal period! In Acumatica, closing a period automatically restricts the period from posting. In AccountMate, this is an additional manual step in the General Ledger module via <Housekeeping><Posting Period Restrictions>. In both cases, lock at least your January 2024 fiscal period to ensure no one typos the year and restates financials from a year ago.
2. Make a backup of your live company! You *WILL* later want reports that are difficult to create after transactions have occurred, so at least make the backup now and then we can restore it for access later. For AccountMate, this requires a SQL geek or our NexSQLBack utility. Acumatica has built-in user functionality to be able to backup your company database to a local snapshot file on your local PC.
3. Check your AccountMate database maintenance plan backup directory! Your AccountMate database should have a database maintenance plan implemented to optimize system performance and, ideally, to automatically backup your database as a “rolling week” of nightly snapshots. While not a complete backup solution, this has “saved the bacon” on numerous occasions, so please confirm the files are being created and confirm with your IT department these files are being copied offsite. For more info, see our complete recommendations for AccountMate system backups.
4. Photocopy your wallet! We are talking backups here, right? It’s pretty valuable to have a backup of your personal portable accounting information for “just in case.”
5. Don’t sweat ordering preprinted tax reporting forms! All federal, and most state, filings are required to be electronic, which is fully supported by the Aatrix integration to Accounts Payable and Payroll. The vendor and employee copies can also be processed by Aatrix, or can be printed to plain paper.
6. Update your retirement plan deduction limits! Not your CPA talking, we listed the new limits in the header article of last month’s NexLAN NewsLine.
7. Vow to make 2025 the year you document procedures! We’ve seen many clients struggle with the loss of a key employee and their knowledge of their business systems and procedures. Always a good idea to systematize your processes in writing. In Acumatica, use the Company Wiki feature to store your documentation; it offers versioning, support for file attachments, user search, and multi-level access rights via user roles.
8. Post NexLAN’s emergency contact information! We’re always available for FREE telephone and email support, toll-free at 877-2NEXLAN, and hope you have a copy of everyone’s off-hours contact info as well. You don’t? Then just email us at support@nexlan.com for a current copy.

Thank you all for 2024, and we look forward to supporting you in 2025 and beyond!!!

Regards,

Kevin E. Stroud
kestrou@nexlan.com
NexLAN, LLC
https://nexlan.com

AccountMate: More-Flexible Order Shipping in the New Version 13.3

You can now ship from a different warehouse than the one assigned to the line item on the sales order.

If the line item isn’t available in the warehouse originally specified in the sales order, and it IS available in another warehouse, you no longer have to first amend the warehouse assigned to the line item on the sales order before it can be shipped. This will make it easier to update the choice of warehouse and streamline your order fulfilment process.

Here’s how to ship the item from a different warehouse, using the new AccountMate SQL/Express V13.3:

1. In SO Module Setup, mark the new checkbox, Allow Ship from Different Warehouse.
2. Doing so will display the Show All Unshipped Items checkbox in the Ship Sales Order function going forward.
3. Whenever you mark the Show All Unshipped Items checkbox, AccountMate will display in the grid all the unshipped line items, including those assigned to a warehouse in the sales order that is different from the one originally selected in the Ship Sales Order screen. Choose any warehouse to ship the item(s) from. Easy peasy.

AccountMate: Newly Scheduled Training Classes

These online, hands-on product training sessions are conducted by AccountMate staff to give you the benefits of a live interaction with your instructor and fellow trainees. 

Registration closes seven calendar days prior to the session date.

➤ Core Product Training for AccountMate SQL/Express

February 5 – March 20, 2025 (Wednesdays and Thursdays) – 2 to 4 hours each day; 39 hours total

Course Overview   |  Course Outline   |   Course Schedule

Registration is now open!

Contact NexLAN to register.

This class will repeat in June/July, and again in October/November, 2025. We’ll remind you here as the dates get closer.

Remember that your Lifecycle Maintenance includes at least one free seat per year in the Core Product class. Who at your company will benefit from this hands-on learning?

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➤ Manufacturing Module Product Training for AccountMate SQL/Express

April 16–17, 2025 (Wednesday and Thursday) – 3 hours each day; 6 hours total

Course Overview   |   Course Outline   |   Course Schedule

Registration opens later in January 2025.

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➤ Payroll Module Product Training for AccountMate SQL/Express will be September 15-19, 2025.

Acumatica: Bank Feeds Make It Easy to See How Much Cash You Have

When bank reconciliations aren’t current, it’s hard to make confident decisions about spending money:

• Do you find it’s a struggle to keep up with your current cash position because of the volume of financial transactions you deal with each month? 
• Do you have to chase down your traveling salespeople to get receipts to validate the credit card statements when your statements don’t match up? 
• Do you have to complete double the number of bank reconciliations due to sweep accounts?

Use Bank Feeds to securely connect your bank and credit card accounts to your Acumatica and let the Auto-Match function streamline your reconciliation process.

1. Import your bank transactions into Acumatica

➤ Link your bank and credit card accounts to Acumatica with Plaid or MX to import your transactions on the automated schedule of your choosing—daily, weekly, monthly.

➤ If your bank or credit card company is not one of the 14,000 that support Plaid or MX, you can still upload the transactions manually using a variety of standard file formats.

2. Click a button to Auto-Match the transactions

Acumatica will match up the imported transactions to the transactions in your system. 

You have the flexibility to change over 20 default matching rules. For example, maybe you want to allow matching to credit memos and debit adjustments. Or maybe you want a wider posting window (more days) for your credit card transactions to be matched with expense reports.

3. Review and finalize the Auto-Match.
Filter down to just the transactions that Acumatica flagged for your attention in the associated dashboard, such as:

• A monthly account maintenance fee that was charged, that still needs to be entered into your Acumatica.
• A check you just mailed out to the water company two days ago that has not yet hit the bank—which needs to remain unmatched until it is cashed by the water company.
• A recent charge from a hotel on the credit card with no expense receipt to tie it to—you can create a business event to automatically email your employee to submit their expense report for the training they went to.

It’s built in:

Manual importing of transaction files from your bank, and the Auto-Matching, the dashboard, and one bank feed for testing, are all built into your General Financials and ready to use. Automated Bank Feeds linking to your bank and credit card accounts requires a license (it’s very affordable) in batches of 10 or 50 accounts.

Learn more:

View the Acumatica Bank Feeds product brochure PDF. Then reach out to NexLAN to discuss the next steps specific to your company and your Acumatica system. We can demo the bank feed features, show you how you’ll link each of your bank accounts, walk you through the initial configuration steps that you can do or we can do for you, and answer your questions so you can get started!

Acumatica: Will 2025 Be Your “Year of the Warehouse?”

Warehouse management is a good area of focus for continuous improvement of getting the right items to your customers quickly and without incident. With all of 2025 lying ahead, consider scheduling one or more projects to make your workflow even better.

Here are some ideas to help you brainstorm and prioritize improvements:

1. You may already know what project to choose.

It’s the improvement that you and your team have on the back burner.

Maybe your most recent busy season had you hiring more temporary seasonal workers than ever, and training them quickly didn’t go well, creating delays and errors. This could be smoother going forward if you document your packing and shipping standards, using Acumatica’s Wiki feature as highlighted in Kevin’s article at the top of this newsletter.

2.  Your team may have great ideas to improve things.

Consider hosting an idea-generation event. Ask everyone to send in their best ideas to improve your customers’ order receiving experiences. Then create a sports-like tournament bracket to match up the ideas. Discuss the pairings together, to see which ideas would make the bigger impact and thus should advance to the next bracket.

Perhaps the current status of RMA items is too often unclear or even lost. Moving those defective and items along to replacement and restocking could really benefit from Acumatica’s ability to track them for you in its ticketing system.

3. You may get new ideas from this ebook.

Pages 2-5 of Acumatica’s Prepare for the Warehouse of the Future ebook offer a nice overview of key automations available. View the PDF and see what jumps out at you as perfect next addition for your business.

Maybe integrating digital scales and printers to Acumatica to automatically weigh shipments and print shipping labels and packing slips would save you time daily and prevent errors. Or perhaps the addition of OCR scanning to your receiving process would let you capture vendor bills of lading and packing slips, extracting and storing the data and documents in Acumatica.

What ideas rise to the top of your list?

Keeping your warehouse running like a well-oiled machine requires continuous technology improvements and human optimizations so that you can stay ahead in your market. Whether you want to add on a new module or a third-party add-on, or simply tweak your system just a bit to do something the way you want it done—we at NexLAN would be excited to partner with you to get that project into your “done” pile.

Here’s hoping that 2025 is your Year of the Warehouse. It’s up to you, as Captain Picard of the USS Enterprise would say, to “Make it so!”

AccountMate Tech Note: Year-End Technical Notes

Review the following Technical Notes to help you prepare for year-end processes, or to refresh your memory of the details since last year:

• Article #1257: Closing the Period in AccountMate
• Article #1258: Common Closing Errors
• Article #1261: Year-End Closing Procedures
• Article #1262: Year-End Closing Tech Tips
• Article #1265: Consolidated Closing Procedures

View the related recorded webinars with comprehensive details: Closing the Period in AccountMate and Fiscal Year-End Closing.

AccountMate Tech Note: Payroll Year-End Technical Notes

Reference the following Technical Notes related to the Payroll Tax Subscription Program and Tax Year Closing:

• Article #1215: Understanding the PR Tax Subscription Program
• Article #1255: Reports Affected by the W-2/1099 Year-End Closing and Payroll Period-End Closing for the Last Period of the Current Fiscal Year
• Article #1260: Tax Year Closing Procedures
• Article #1341: Identifying the Tax Table and Tax Reporting Year Used in Payroll Transactions

Acumatica Technical Tips

How Do I Edit the Workspaces on My Mobile App?

Q: I want to change the menu options on my Acumatica Mobile app to remove things that I don’t use. How can I do this?

A: To edit the workspaces or screens in your mobile app go to More Items > Configuration > Customization > Profiles > Mobile Workspaces. Click Workspace ID for the workspace you would like to edit. You can now add, remove, and reorder the screens on the workspace you selected.

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How to Release All Payments Received for the Day?

Q: Can I release all the payments I received from all my customers at once rather than one at a time on each payment record?

A: You can release all Balanced payments, unreleased applications of open payments, and credit memos.  Under Receivables > Processes > Release AR Documents, check the boxes for which payments you would like to release, and then click Release.

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Where Do I Add Additional Tax IDs?

Q: We need to add a new Tax ID for collecting taxes. Where do I go to add this?

A: To add a new Tax ID go to More Items > Financials > Taxes > Profiles > Taxes and click the plus sign add a new record and enter all the details for your new Tax ID.

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How to Set the Default Customer Country?

Q: We only do business in the United States. When I am entering a New Customer or Vendor, how can I make the Country field auto-fill to the United States for me?

A: You can set the default country for New Customers or Vendors by assigning US as the default Country in your Customer and Vendor Classes. Go to Receivables/Payables > Preferences > Customer/Vendor Classes and select the class you would like to add the default country to. On the General Tab, under Default General Settings set the Country as US and save your changes.

AccountMate Technical Tips

How Do I Create a Recurring Journal Entry?

Versions: AM10 for SQL and Express (and higher versions)

Module: GL

Q: How do I create a recurring journal entry?

A: You must first create a recurring journal entry template using the Journal Entry Transactions function’s ► Recurring JE Template option. Enter the recurring JE details such as the number of cycles, next recurring and end recurring dates, journal entry lines, etc. When you save the template, take note of the Batch #.

To create the actual journal entry from the recurring journal entry template, access the Create JE from Recurring JE Template function, enter the recurring JE Batch #, enter the recurring batch date range; then, Save. If you want to review the journal entry before saving it, then access the Journal Entries tab.

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Why Can’t I Do a Partial Credit Card Refund?

Versions: AM13 for SQL and Express (and higher versions)

Module: AR

Q: I was trying to record a credit card refund; however, I got the message, “Partial refunds cannot be performed on the same day as the original credit card transaction…” Why can’t I do this?

A: You cannot do a partial refund on the same day that a credit card transaction was performed. This is because the credit card transaction has not been settled with the bank yet. You can record a partial refund the next day. This is by design; it’s a restriction by credit card processors like REPAY or Authorize.NET.

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Why Is the Multi-Level Price for My Item Read-Only?

Versions: AM10 for SQL and Express (and higher versions)

Modules: AR, IC, PC, SO

Q: I want to create a multi-level price (MLP) record for an item; however, when I click on the MLP checkbox in the Inventory Basic Price window, the message “The control is read-only.” is displayed. How can I create a multi-level price record for the item?

A: The MLP checkbox is automatically marked once the MLP record is set up for item # + U of M (unit of measure) record.

To set up multi-level prices, perform the following:

1. Select the applicable item # + U of M in the Inventory Basic Price Setup window.
2. Right-click on the italicized MLP label.
3. Set up the multi-level price by price code, quantity, or price code + quantity (if you have the Pricing Control module) in the Inventory Multi-Level Price Maintenance window.
4. Click OK to go back to the Inventory Basic Price Setup window.
5. Click Update to save your entries.

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How Do I Not Print a Payroll Check for $0.00?

Versions: AM10 for SQL and Express (and higher versions)

Module: PR

Q: Is there a way to not print a payroll check with a $0.00 check amount?

A: Use the Post Handwritten Check function to record the payment if you do not want to print the check.

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