Another application, General Subsidiary, contains additional capability that you may find useful in your day-to-day operations. General Subsidiary is available as an add-on to General Ledger.
General Subsidiary provides you with the ability to extend the reporting capability of any account by any number of segments. It provides a further breakdown of the account balance information by allowing a "subsidiary code" to be appended to the account number during Transaction Processing. This in turn allows you to track various revenue, expense, or asset transactions.
For example, you might want to keep track of costs and income from a particular product or service that you sell. If you have Accounts Payable, when you purchase goods that contribute to the making of that product or service, you can identify the subsidiary code as well as the account number on the invoice line item. If you have Accounts Receivable, you can identify the revenues produced by that product or service by supplying the subsidiary code on the sales invoice line item. The sum of all those postings can then tell you which of your products or services is the most profitable to your company.
Another example of the use of General Subsidiary might be to identify and collect information on the costs associated with creating product. These products could be as diverse as the construction of a building, the manufacturing of machines from purchased parts, or the writing and publishing of a book.
If you do not have Accounts Payable or Accounts Receivable, you can still collect information in General Subsidiary by entering the amounts as Journal Entries in General Ledger.