Re: how to handle cost-center in ofbiz

[David E Jones]

-David

Thanks for you posts Vikrant, I think you answered this in more detail and better than I could. A lot of work is going on in the ofbiz accounting component, to replace and surpass (like the automatic error journal, for example) the opentaps financials component. This is of course still a work in progress, and you are very correct about the intent of OFBiz, ie that it is intended to be a more complete ERP (, etc) system rather than designed as any sort of independent accounting system. I also agree that with a little extension (and especially once the current accounting build out is complete) the OFBiz accounting stuff could do these same things that independent/separate financial systems do to make reporting easier when the source/trigger data isn't available. Anyway, thanks again for your comments. I hope things are going well over there are Bertelsmann. On Jan 8, 2008, at 8:00 PM, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <[EMAIL PROTECTED] > wrote:

Hi Mugunth,

In General the cost center are designed for reporting and analytical purpose in Financial systems. In SAP you will find different codes. Now the cost center can have multiple dimension like they may relate to employee and project or just an employee or to a specific branch or a specific office. This is something you will find pretty standard in most of the financial systems which later on changed to ERP (so they call them ERP because they can do more then finance). In ofbiz there is no concept of cost centers since in the core you do not have any major financial module. But indeed you have a details implementation of Accounting standards (mind it cost centers are not accounting standards but used by company for reporting and analytical purpose). Now in ofbiz every transaction has a source it can be an subsidiary, branch, employee, it can be a product, it can be a vendor, it can be invoice, it can be a payment (both incoming and outgoing). Moreover each accounting entry can be linked to customer, vendor, invoice, payment at a given time. So indeed you can built a analytical and reporting layer on top of it. The problem comes only when you have multiple companies and have inter-company transaction and when you use a HQ company to pay for the expenses of subsidiary. This part in ofbiz needs to be developed separately. You can have a look at http://www.opentaps.org/ which has a financial module but again you really still need to customize it to implement cost center which I found is very easy to do indeed.

Thanks
With best regards,
Vikrant


-----Original Message-----
From: Mugunth Subramanian [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Tuesday, January 08, 2008 10:04 PM
To: user@ofbiz.apache.org
Subject: how to handle cost-center in ofbiz

Hi all,



to various cost centers.
We need to be able to take reports for the whole company or to various
cost centers.

I am not sure how to handle cost centers. Pls help to clarify this.

Thanks,
Mugunth

Also if you can tell me your 5 cost center I can provide you some feedback on how to implement in ofbiz :), although it should be a job of a financial consultant ;). If you are looking for a strong financial functionality then I would suggest you better look at some other opensource offerings which have a better financial modules. Ofbiz is very good product if you want a single unified ERP. But if your main focus is financial system and then built supporting layer around it then I would suggest make ofbiz as operational ERP and use some financial system as ofbiz provides a very good integration engine. Indeed you can find some examples of ofbiz integrated with sql-ledger another accounting system. I could not find documentation on handling cost center concept in ofbiz. our company has about 5 cost centers. We need to associate the accounts

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