Financial Packages Features and Functions
This financial software knowledge base anticipates as many factors as possible to establish your selection criteria for general ledger, accounts payable and receivable, reporting, and other bookkeeping requirements. This knowledge base in particular, offers a view on enterprise financial packages, which can complement an existing ERP system.
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General Ledger
General ledger keeps centralized charts of accounts and corporate financial balances. It supports all aspects of the business accounting process. In this module, financial accounting transactions are posted, processed, summarized, and reported. It maintains a complete audit trail of transactions and enables individual business units to view their financial information, while parent companies can roll up all business subsidiaries and view the consolidated information.
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Accounts Payable (A/P)
Accounts payable schedules bill payments to suppliers and distributors, and keeps accurate information about owed money, due dates, and available discounts. It provides functionality and integration to other areas such as customer service, purchasing, inventory, and manufacturing control. The software should support the following functionality: AP company policies and procedures; suppliers/voucher master data; payment controls; invoice processing and aging analysis; payment processing; journal voucher processing; AP ledger posting; check processing; AP transactions and controls; and AP reporting.
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Fixed Assets
Fixed assets manages depreciation and other costs associated with tangible assets such as buildings, property and equipment. The software should support the following functionality: fixed assets records; asset transactions; asset depreciation; depreciation books; revaluation and interest calculation; and tax reporting.
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Cost Accounting
Cost accounting analyzes corporate costs related to overhead, products, and manufacturing orders. It provides a variety of costing approaches such as standard, FIFO, LIFO, average, target, and activity-based costing (ABC). The software should support the following functionality: cost data; cost allocation definitions; cost allocation process; cost management; cost and sales price calculation; activity based costing (ABC); and activity based cost tracing and tracking.
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Cash Management
Cash management involves the capability of the system to record cash charges or deposits, recording of cash payments and receipts, cash projection reporting, calculation of expected cash uses/sources, current cash availability, etc. It monitors and analyzes cash holdings, financial deals, and investment risks.
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Budgeting
Budgeting involves budgetary controls, budget accounting, budget development, and budget allocation. The software should provide sufficient tools to enable detailed budget development and analysis. Additional functionality should be available to integrate with project management software applications either natively or with external interfaces.
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Accounts Receivable
Accounts receivable tracks payments due to a company from its customers. It contains tools to control and expedite the receipt of money from the entry of a sales order to posting payments received. The software should support the following functionality: AR company policies and procedures; customers/voucher master data; bill processing and aging analysis; credit management; cash/payment application, receipt processing; journal voucher processing; AR ledger posting; multicurrency accounting and conversions; AR transactions and controls; and AR reporting.
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Financial Reporting
Financial reporting enables robust analysis of company performance through delivered reports. These reports will allow individual business units to view their financial information, while parent companies can roll up all business subsidiaries and view the consolidated information. Additionally, solutions should provide user generated reporting tools that are easy to use and provide sufficient depth of and access to the financial data to permit comprehensive analysis.
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Project Accounting
Project accounting uses financial practices to monitor the schedules and spending of projects.
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Product Technology
This group of criteria defines the technical architecture of the product as well as the technological environment in which the product can run successfully. Criteria include product and application architecture, software usability and administration, platform and database support, application standards support, communications and protocol support and integration capabilities. Relative to the other evaluation criteria, best practice selections place a lower relative importance on the product technology criterion. This apparently lower importance is deceptive because the product technology usually houses the majority of the selecting organization's mandatory criteria, which generally include server, client, protocol and database support, application scalability, and other architectural capabilities. The definition of mandatory criteria within this set often allows the client to quickly narrow the long list of potential vendors to a short list of applicable solutions that pass muster relative to the most basic mandatory selection criteria.
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Accounting and Financial Management Features and Functions
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