[gnue-sb-discuss] RE: General Ledger and Accounts Payable

[Nicholas Lee]

Few suggestions I have:

Overall:
 * Must be able to support multiple currencies.  

General Ledger
 *  Month End process
 *  Audit trail/control reports 
 *  Trial Balance

Accounts Payable
 * Aged Trial Balance
 * Allow different control accounts dependant on transaction type.
    - Payments into different bank accounts
    - Invoices into different AP control accounts. 

Accounts Receivable
 * Since AR (ignoring stock, etc) an AP with a different control
   account its easy enough to include both.


Regarding:

"
However, one feature we've seen in other proprietary packages is, after
a few years, you can "archive" old transaction information, but keep the
balance information in place for reporting purposes. Keeping a balance
table would also be a performance boon.
"

A system I use does: batch transactions by type and day, with batch
total amounts stored in the batch header table.  

General Ledger
  * Inter-Company Posting

You'll need to define control accounts in each ledger in order to keep
the sheets balanced.


"gl_account_categories"  - add a short code to the scheme. 
  ie.  SHORTCODE    varchar(7) not null
       E, "Expense" 

define   
   TYPICAL_BALANCE    varchar(1) not null,   -- C=credit/D=debit
ie. Add/Subtract instead of per gl_account.

Might pay to specify P&L vs Balance Sheet accounts here.

ie:
create table gl_account_categories
  (ID                   varchar(3) not null,
   COMPANY              number(12) not null,
   DESCRIPTION          varchar(50) not null,
   SHORTCODE            varchar(7) not null,
   SIGN                 varchar(1),
   TRADE                bool
   unique (company, description, SHORTCODE) )


-- 
Nicholas Lee - nj.lee at plumtree.co dot nz, somewhere on the fish Maui caught.
gpg. 8072 4F86 EDCD 4FC1 18EF  5BDD 07B0 9597 6D58 D70C            icq. 1612865 

                         Quixotic Eccentricity