FI Accounting Process

"Accounting" in the ]po[ refers to the elaboration of Balance Sheets and Income Statements via double-entry book keeping.

The ]po[ team deliberately decided not to include double-entry accounting functionality within ]po[. Instead, ]po[ will export its captured financial information to an external accounting package. 

Process Input

• The list of financial documents of the current quarter
• Information about customers and providers as master data 

Process Output

• Income statement
• Balance sheet
• Payment information on Customer Invoices and Provider Bills (optional)
  

Reasons to Exclude Double-Entry Accounting from ]po[

• Accounting is not very relevant for decision making in service companies.
  Accounting has been developed to keep records of companies producing or moving physical goods. Services companies in contrast exhibit a very simple financial structure, dominated by HR expenses. Quarterly income statements and balance sheets don't contribute much for management decision making. Instead, service companies typically need profit & loss analysis per project, customer or service type.
  
  
• Accounting processes widely differ between different countries.
  A huge development effort is necessary to maintain the accounting rules according to changing tax legislation.
  
  
• Low-cost accounting packages are readily available for each country:
  There are many efficient accounting packages available in each country that satisfy country's specific legal and cultural requirements. Most of these packages include options to import invoices from an Excel or CSV file (see below).  

Accounting Functionality Available as Part of ]po[

Having said that (excluding double-entry accounting from ]po[), there are a number of accounting functionalities available that are suitable for running the accounting department of (very) small service organizations:

• Payments package allows to register payments for each invoice or provider bill.
  
  
• The Invoices package includes basic means for accounts receivable and accounts payable processes.
  
  
• Finance Reporting package includes an income statement and VAT report.  

Integration With Accounting Packages

 ]po[ today includes a number of ways to export financial data suitable to be imported by accounting packages:

• Finance -> Export Financial Documents CSV:
  This option allows you to export all financial documents (customers & providers) into a single CSV/Excel sheet. Accountants can massage these data quickly to convert them into a format suitable for most accounting software packages.
  

•  Reporting -> Finance Documents and their Projects:
  This report extracts financial documents, grouped by projects. This report can easily be adapted to export financial information in a format directly suited to be imported into accounting packges
  
  
• There is a intranet-ubl (closed-source extension) package for export of financial documents to and from Microsoft NAV Navision via UBL (Universal Business Language), a simplified variant of ebXML.
  
  
• There is are special SAP FI and [SAP PS] interfaces available for importing general ledger information from SAP into ]po[.
  

Process Indicators

• ToDo