A department is basically a further level of breakdown in an account (in accounting parlance, a department is a subledger).
Departments are useful when the same income or expense codes are applicable to more than one similar item. Without departments each item would need an individual general ledger code, and potentially your chart of accounts could get very large. With departments, the same general ledger code can be shared by more than one item.
— MoneyWorks v7 User Guide page G-275
The Departmental Accounts is a useful feature in the MoneyWorks accounting software. It helps to break down an account into a detailed sub-ledger.
For example, if you are selling products to the countries such as Australia, Hong Kong, Malaysia, New Zealand, and Singapore, you can create these countries as a department to track the sales and expenses instead of having dividual sales and expenses accounts for each country in the chart of accounts list.
You can also use the departmental feature in MoneyWorks to track the expenses incurred by each department, such as Sales, Admin, and R&D, in your company.
You can use the departmental feature in many areas, such as a school may use it to track the courses, project-based businesses can use it to track projects, and an event company may consider using department to track the income and expenses of each event organised.
MoneyWorks uses the "Departmental accounts" feature to create a sub-ledger and at the same time keep the Chart of Accounts list neat and tidy.
You can print most of the reports in MoneyWorks for the entire company or just the selected department(s).
Besides the standard Profit and Loss report, the accountant can use the "Show Department" feature in the report wizard to print a Profit and Loss report with the sub-ledger listed.
The accountants may use the "Condense to" or "Subtotal by" feature under the Sort field of the report wizard to categorise the accounts into the various departments.
MoneyWorks allows you to print a Profit & Loss report of a department individually. Example, when preparing a progress report of the R&D department to your management, you may want to attach a Profit & Loss report shows only the income and expenses of the R&D department instead of the Profit & Loss report of the whole company.