On Wed, Feb 18, 2009 at 4:14 PM, Chris Bennett <[email protected]> wrote:
> As Chris suggested, a one button, quick reversal system would be great. > Perhaps there may be a way of excluding the mistaken and their reversed > transactions from informal reports (but never from formal reports). > Actually one of the elements we are working on will do exactly that (and exclude from formal reports as well, provided the transaction is not posted to the books): Drafts and vouchers. This is also a bigger deal for larger businesses. Let me explain the basics: One of the issues that starts to occur when you have a business which has more than one person responsible for the books (or a bookkeeper other than the owner) is you have the possibility of embezzlement. One of the primary ways that this risk is managed is using a principle called separation of duties. So in this case, one person could create a GL, AR, AP, payment, or other transaction and save it to the system without posting it to the books. A second person has to come around, review the transaction, make sure everything looks good, and post it. The idea is to make it harder for people to steal money from the business by requiring collusion between employees, but it also has the effect of ensuring that people's work is double-checked before it is posted to the books. A single one of these is what we call a "draft." A collection of these would be a "batch" of "vouchers." These terms arise from paper-oriented workflows. Now, aside from the fact that there are plenty of variations in what sort of policies companies may have in implementing this sort of thing, the error control function is actually a pertinent here. Until a draft or voucher is approved it is not a financial transaction. People with permission to do so could edit an invoice if necessary before it is approved. You can already do this to an extent with orders vs invoices, but this is a little different. For a draft sales invoice, one could not create an authoritative view of the COGS until it is approved because of the problem discussed before, but it could be edited prior to being approved (approval posts to books). Unapproved transactions are excluded from all financial reports because they are not financial transactions yet. Hope this helps, Chris Travers ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Open Source Business Conference (OSBC), March 24-25, 2009, San Francisco, CA -OSBC tackles the biggest issue in open source: Open Sourcing the Enterprise -Strategies to boost innovation and cut costs with open source participation -Receive a $600 discount off the registration fee with the source code: SFAD http://p.sf.net/sfu/XcvMzF8H _______________________________________________ Ledger-smb-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ledger-smb-devel
