Several months ago there was a discussion [1] where it was justified the link between analytics and accounting. There I agreed with this need but I have somewhat changed my view on that.
Some background to justify why having analytics linked to accounting is not the best option for all use cases: Soon after that discussion we had a requirement for managing budgets with analytics. A public foundation who manages public and private funds needed to have a robust system to ensure the money spent on a given project did not exceed the funds. Analytics (with a budget management module) are appropriate for that, but one needs to ensure that purchase orders are treated as committed budget, even if there has not been any accounting moves. At the same time, one needs to ensure that the comparison between accounting profit & loss report and analytics is correct and that can only happen if analytics have their move in accounting. Our solution with the unnamed software was to: - Create analytic moves unlinked from accounting on purchases and sales. - Ensure that move lines of non profit & loss move lines have NO analytic moves. - Ensure that ALL move lines of profit & loss move lines DO have analytic moves and that analytic and accounting amounts match. - When opening the analytic plan (in the wizard), allow the user to show only aggregated information of analytic moves that have linked accounting: this way it is possible to ensure that analytic and accounting profit & loss match. - Add a simple way to find out which analytic moves do not have linked accounting lines with a filter. Another demand, from another company, has been the creation of analytic lines when stocks are moved from certain locations and explicitly without moves on accounting. In this case they treat several locations (farms and animal feed factories) as independent and each move from one location to another is considered as an internal sale in analytic accounting at cost price. As said, in this case, there's never a related accounting move. Implementing both use cases on top of Tryton framework now would have only one issue and it is the fact that the move_line field is required in analytic_account.line. I'd like to propose to make this required but only with validate() instead of an SQL constraint. Comments? [1] https://groups.google.com/d/topic/tryton/lgnaxA1o8Mo/discussion -- Albert Cervera i Areny Tel. 93 553 18 03 @albertnan www.NaN-tic.com
