This chapter traces the accounting workflow in OpenERP, from entering an invoice to registering payments. The various operations are described, from the entry of accounting receipts to the treatment of the reconciliation process, including payment orders.
Accounting is at the heart of managing a company: all the company’s operations have an impact here. It has an informational role (how much cash is there? what debts need to be repaid?) and, because of the information it provides, a reliable and detailed accounting system can and should have a major decision-making role.
In most companies, accounting is limited to producing statutory reports and satisfying the directors’ curiosity about certain strategic decisions, and to printing the balance sheet and the income statement several times a year. Even then, there is often several weeks of delay between reality and the report.
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Valueing your Accounting Function
In many small companies, the accounting function is poorly treated.
Not only do you see the data for documents being entered into the system twice, but also the results are often just used to produce legal documents and regular printouts of the balance sheet and income statements some weeks after the closing dates.
By contrast, integrating your accounts with your management system means that you can:
So accounting is too often underused. The information it brings makes it a very effective tool for running the company if accounting is integrated into the management system. Financial information really is necessary in all of your company’s processes for you to be effective, for example:
OpenERP’s general and analytic accounting handle these needs well because of the close integration between all of the application modules. Furthermore, the transactions, the actions and the financial analyses happen in real time, so that you cannot only monitor the situation, but also manage it effectively.
Financial Management in OpenERP covers general accounting, analytic accounting, auxiliary and budgetary accounting. It is double-entry, multi-currency and multi-company.
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Accounting
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Multi-company
There is a choice of methods for integrating OpenERP in a multi-company environment:
One of the great advantages of integrating accounts with all of the other modules is in avoiding the double entry of data into accounting documents. So in OpenERP, an Order automatically generates an Invoice, and the Invoice automatically generates the accounting entries. These in turn generate tax submissions, customer reminders, and so on. Such strong integration enables you to:
All the accounts are held in the default currency (which is specified in the company definition), but each account and/or transaction can also have a secondary currency (which is defined in the account). The value of multi-currency transactions is then tracked in both currencies.