1 Topic by t2webby (edited by t2webby 10/21/2008 09:35:44 pm)

  • From: Canada
  • Registered: 06/04/2008
  • Posts: 72

Topic: Control Accounts and More safety to ensure books are always accurate

The main control accounts for financial are A/R, A/P, and Inventory. I think there should be a safety measure in place to ensure that no journal entries are to be performed to these sub ledgers unless absolutely necessary. I think there should be a warning with a (yes or no) and even a enter in password feature (as is the case in larger ERP systems) to ensure end users know exactly that doing journal entries on these accounts should be avoided and that postings to these accounts should be done using the business logical steps designed for the system.

Another thing also is the Inventory Valuation. In alot of cases, Inventory is given its value based on Supplier Invoices on Received Goods or through an inventory adjustment. The only TIME the inventory account on the balance sheet is NOT equal to the value shown on the inventory valuation report is when goods are received but has not yet given its value because an invoice hasn't been issued against those received items yet. There shouldn't be any other time where these numbers are out of synch. So with that being said, I think the system should somehow prompt up a message everytime the inventory account balance and the inventory valuation total is out of synch so that if cought early on, we can determine if it just outstanding received POs (GRN) yet to be invoiced and to go about clearing those up, Or it could be something completely different (which we want to fix right away before things get perpetual worse and our accountant can't figure out why the number are the inventory value is out of synch. I think having this safety / warning in place will allow FA also to determine scenarios fixes early on. I've tried to test as many scenarios as I can recently but i'm sure there may be cases that could pop up that haven't been considered so its important I think to have these measures in place to get at problems early on. I think perhaps the best would be to have the system always check if Inventory account + outstanding GRN = Inventory Valuation Report Value, then its ok, otherwise raise a warning/error right away cause there is an obvious problem here.

Also, it would also be good on the trial balance page to show the credit and debit total balance at the end so that we can quickly catch out of synch accounts early.

I think this piece software is great and has improved so much since the version 1 thanks to the FA developers.

  • joe
  • Administrator
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  • Registered: 03/15/2007
  • Posts: 5,107

Re: Control Accounts and More safety to ensure books are always accurate

Hello and thanks for your nice words.

We can fix the trial balance to show the totals at once!
Regarding the AR, AP and Inventory accounts. It could be fixed in two ways.
1. We can block selections on these accounts in GL entry, just like the bank accounts. So only admins are allowed to enter amounts on these accounts. But you can have alternative values for these accounts, so it will only work partly.
2. It could be a setup in company setup, but this is less secure (unless these values could only be set by admins).

Otherwise have a little more research about this before doing anything?!

/Joe

  • From: Canada
  • Registered: 06/04/2008
  • Posts: 72

Re: Control Accounts and More safety to ensure books are always accurate

I think the approach of 1) is more like it and more secure. I was just suggesting going to the extent of adding a password on TOP in the case even the admin may make the error, even a little popup asking for 1234 password would do, so that whoever is doing this is absolutely certain. But I think as a start I would only allow admin to do be able to do these entries ya.

Good stuff on the trial balance.

What about the warning for the inventory valuation comparison thing? What do you think about that?