Руководство Open ERP (Бухгалтерский учет)

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? what’s the stock valuation?) and, because of the information it provides, a reliable and detailed accounting system can and should have a major decision-making role.

In most real 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’s often several weeks of delay between reality and the report.

Note: Valuing your accounting function

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 documentation 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:

reduce data entry effort – you only need do it once,

run your processes with the benefit of financial vision: for example in managing projects, negotiating contracts, and forecasting cash flow,

easily get hold of useful information when you need it, such as a customer’s credit position.

So accounting is too often underused. The information it brings makes it a very effective tool for running the company if it’s integrated into the management system. Accounting information really is necessary in all of your company’s processes for you to be effective, for example:

for preparing quotations it’s important to know the precise financial position of the client, and to see a history of any delays in payment,

if a given customer has exceeded their credit limit, accounting can automatically stop further deliveries to the customer,

if a project budget is 80% consumed but the project is only 20% complete you could renegotiate with the client, or review and rein in the objectives of the project,

if you need to improve your company’s cash flow then you could plan your services projects on the basis of billing rates and payment terms of the various projects, and not just delivery dates – you could work on short-term client projects in preference to R&D projects, for example.

Open ERP’s general accounting 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 can not only monitor the situation but also manage it effectively.

The account module in Open ERP covers general accounting, analytic accounting, and auxiliary and budgetary accounting. It’s double-entry, multi-currency and multi-company.

Note: Accounting

General accounting (or financial accounting) is for identifying the assets and liabilities of the business. It’s managed using double-entry accounting which ensures that each transaction is credited to one account and debited from another.

Analytical accounting (or management accounting, or cost accounting) is an independent accounting system which reflects the general accounts but is structured along axes that represent the company’s management needs.

Auxiliary accounting reflects the accounts of customers and/or suppliers.

Budgetary accounts predefine the expected allocation of resources, usually at the start of a financial year.

Tip: Multi-company

There is a choice of methods for integrating Open ERP in a multi-company environment:

if the companies hold few documents in common (such as products, or partners - any Open ERP resource), you should install separate databases,

if the companies share many documents, you can register them in the same database and install Open ERP’s multi-company documents to finely manage access rights,

you can synchronize specified document types in several databases using the base_synchro module, which is a shared-funding module rather than in the standard open repositories.

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 Open ERP 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:

reduce data entry work,

greatly reduce the number of data entry errors,

get information in real time and enable very fast reaction times (for bill reminders, for example),

exert timely control over all areas of company management.

Tip: For accountants

When you create a database you can elect to install only the accounting modules by choosing the Accounting only profile profile_accounting.

You should then install the web portal portal_account. With appropriate rights management, this allows trustees to provide customers with real-time access to their data. It also gives them the opportunity to work on certain documents that have no direct accounting impact, such as budgets.

This can provide an added-value service that greatly improves the interaction between trustees and their clients.

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.

For this chapter you should start with a fresh database that includes demo data, with sale and its dependencies installed and no particular chart of accounts configured.

Accounting workflow and the automatic generation of invoices

The chart Accounting workflow for invoicing and payment shows the financial workflow followed by each invoice.

(Pic) Accounting workflow for invoicing and payment

In general, when you use all of Open ERP’s functionality, invoices don’t need to be entered manually. Draft invoices are generated automatically from other documents such as Purchase Orders.

Draft Invoices

The system generates invoice proposals which are initially set to the Draft state. While these invoices remain unconfirmed they have no accounting impact within the system. There’s nothing to stop users creating their own draft invoices if they want to.

You can create draft invoice manually : Finantial Management / Invoices / Customer Invoices / New Customer Invoice

The information that’s needed for invoicing is automatically taken from the Partner form (such as payment conditions and the invoice address) or from the Product (such as the account to be used) or from a combination of the two (such as applicable Taxes and the Price of the product).

Tip: Draft invoices

There are several advantages in working with Draft invoices:

You’ve got an intermediate validation state before the invoice is approved. This is useful when your accountants aren’t the people creating the initial invoice, but are still required to approve it before the invoice is entered into the accounts.

It enables you to create invoices in advance, without approving them at the same time. You’re also able to list all of the invoices awaiting approval.

Open or Pro-Forma Invoices

You can approve (or validate) an invoice in the Open or Pro Forma state. A Pro Forma invoice doesn’t yet have an invoice number, but the accounting entries on the invoice that’s created correspond to the amounts that Open ERP will record as the customer’s payables.

Tip: Pro Forma invoices

In some countries, you’re not allowed to generate accounting entries from pro forma invoices. You create instead a report from the purchase order, which prints a pro forma invoice that has no accounting consequences within the system.

You can use the module described in Configuration & Administration to create this report.

An open invoice has a unique invoice number. The invoice is sent to the customer and is marked on the system as awaiting payment.

Reconciling invoice entries and payments

In Open ERP an invoice is considered to be paid when its accounting entries have been reconciled with the payment entries. If there hasn’t been a reconciliation an invoice can remain in the open state until you have entered the payment.

Tip: Payment and reconciliation

To avoid surprises, it’s important to understand the idea of reconciliation and its link with invoice payment.

You’ll find both a Reconciled field and the Paid checkbox on an invoice. They differ from each other only if an invoice has been paid (using reconciliation of records) but has subsequently been marked as unreconciled.

Note: Reconciliation

Reconciliation links entries in an account that cancel each other out – they’re reconciled to each other (sum of credits = sum of debits).

This is generally applied to payments against corresponding invoices.

Without the reconciliation process, Open ERP would be incapable of marking invoices that have been paid. Suppose that you’ve got the following situation for the Smith and Offspring customer:

Invoice 145: 50,

Invoice 167: 120,

Invoice 184: 70.

If you receive a payment of 120, Open ERP will delay reconciliation because there’s a choice of invoices to pay. It could either reconcile the payment against invoices 145 and 184 or against invoice 167.

You can cancel an invoice if the Allow Cancelling Entries function has been activated in the journal and the entries haven’t yet been reconciled. You could then move it from Canceled , through the Draft state to modify it and regenerate it.

Tip: Treatment in Lots

Usually, different transactions are grouped together and handled at the same time rather than invoice by invoice. This is called batch work or lot handling.

You can select several documents in the list of invoices: check the checkboxes of the interesting lines using the web client and click the appropriate shortcut button at the right; or shift-click the lines using the mouse in the GTK client and use the action or print button at the top – these give you the option of a number of possible actions on the selected objects.

At regular intervals, and independently of the invoices, an automatic import procedure or a manual accounts procedure can be used to bring in bank statements. These comprise all of the payments of suppliers and customers and general transactions, such as between accounts.

When an account is validated, the corresponding accounting entries are automatically generated by Open ERP.

Invoices are marked as paid when accounting entries on the invoice have been reconciled with accounting entries about their payment.

This reconciliation transaction can be carried out at various places in the process, depending on your preference:

at data entry for the accounting statement,

manually from the account records,

automatically using Open ERP’s intelligent reconciliation.

You can create the accounting records directly, without using the invoice and account statements. To do this, use the rapid data entry form in a journal. Some accountants prefer this approach because they’re used to thinking in terms of accounting records rather than in terms of invoices and payments.

You should really use the forms designed for invoices and bank statements rather than manual data entry records, however. These are simpler and are managed within an error-controlling system.

A records-based system

All the accounting transactions in Open ERP are based on records, whether they’re created by an invoice or created directly.

So partner reminders are generated quickly from the list of unreconciled entries in the trade receivables account for that partner. In a single reminder you’ll find the whole set of unpaid invoices as well as unreconciled payments, such as advance payments.

Similarly, financial statements such as the general ledger, account balance, aged balance (or chronological balance) and the various journals, are all based on accounting entries. It doesn’t matter if you generated the entry from an invoice form or directly in the invoice journal. It’s the same for the tax declaration and other statutory financial statements.

When using integrated accounting, you should still go through the standard billing process because some modules are directly dependent on invoice documents. For example, a customer sale order can be configured to wait for payment of the invoice before triggering a delivery. In such a case, Open ERP automatically generates a draft invoice to send to the client.

Invoicing

In Open ERP, the concept of “invoice” includes the following documents:

the customer invoice,

the supplier invoice,

a customer credit note,

a supplier credit note.

Only the invoice type and the representation mode differ for each of the four documents. But they’re all stored in the same object type in the system.

You get the correct form for each of the four types of invoice from the menu you use to open it. The name of the tab enables you to tell the invoice types apart when you’re working on them.