Compiere's Multi-Accounting allows you to account in multiple, parallel accounting standards. This allows you
to maintain parallel accounting for any combination of the following:
- Accrual and Cash-based Accounting
- Different accounting standards (e.g., US GAAP, UK SAP, German HGB)
- Different inventory costing methods (e.g., Standard, Average, FIFO)
- Different currencies
Usually, a Set of Books is defined as a set of transactions with the same Chart of Accounts, Calendar, Accounting Currency, Accounting Standard and Costing Method. In some situations, it is sufficient to convert or translate your Set of Books results to another Set of Books. For most applications, this is the only option. There are situations, where this is not sufficient:
- Unacceptable rounding and conversion differences
- High manual effort to convert
- Missing audit trail
- Unacceptable time delay of availability of results
- Inability to convert as detail information is missing
Most applications replicate transaction data to be able to support the different accounting dimensions.
Compiere was designed to support multiple accounting. The concept of Set of Books was improved with the concept of Accounting Schema. An Accounting Schema is any combination of the following:
- Chart of Accounts
- Accrual or Cash-based accounting
- Accounting standard
- Costing method
- Accounting currency
Note, that in contrast to Set of Books, Calendar is not directly part of an Accounting Scheme, as you may have multiple calendars per accounting schema. The calendar is reduced to transaction support functions (open/close periods, summary postings, allocation definition ease of entry).
In contrast to most applications, Compiere differentiates Transaction and the resulting accounting consequences with the following benefits:
- Transaction data is not replicated
- You can add or discontinue an accounting scheme anytime
- You can generate accounting information for historical transactions
- You can modify or replace any attribute (and optionally regenerate the accounting)
- Easy to extend and to maintain
- Error tolerant (you correct it and regenerate)
Transactions are performed immediately with high priority (e.g. inventory update, invoice paid); the accounting is performed asynchronously with lower priority and depending on system load.
It is possible for customers to extend accounting rules, if the predefined accounting rules are not sufficient (internally, accounting rules are defined using an accounting rule engine).
Interested in some of our other "Multi" capability? Feel free to review:
Multi-Organization - Multi-Currency - Multi-Accounting - Multi-Costing
Multi-Language - Multi-Tax