GL Integration - Classifications

[David.Simmonds]

Classifications:
In a discussion with Mike he was asking whether I thought we needed to have the individual GL Accounts stored at the Inventory, Debtor or Creditor Level. Do we have enough/any customers who have made changes to the GL Codes (at an individual debtor or Inventory Item level) to warrant keeping this function in JIWA 7.

I can see that with Inventory and Debtors there is a possibility of very few changes being made between the Classification and the Debtor or the Inventory Items. Creditors is different in that each Creditor Account by default needs to point to its own GL Expense Account, e.g. Telephone, Cost of Goods, Marketing.

Would this mean that we then have two methods of using the Classifications, or would creating a different Creditor Classification for each Creditor Expense type be a suitable way of getting around this. We would need to make creating Classifications Easier - add the ability to copy a classification?

[Mike.Sheen]

Does nobody else replying to this give us a mandate to remove GL account "overrides" per discrete entity (inventory item, debtor and creditor) ?

If so, whoohoo!

[Mike.Sheen]

Actually, I had a good think about this today as I'm just re-writing the Inventory Maintenance form now.

I came across classifications, and was looking at what needed to happen in Inventory Maintenance when the user changed the classification.

Currently, when the user changes a classification, we pull through from the classification a bunch of fields (GL accounts, Tax rates, etc) and populate the corresponding fields on the inventory item.

I looked at this and thought - well what exactly is this trying to achieve ? Is it not a template type of functionality ?

So, I'm thinking why don't we make Classifications just a field, and changing the classification does nothing more than alter the classification to which the item belongs.

Then, we add the ability to make items of type "Template" - these items cannot be sold, purchased or used in any way OTHER than to make new items from them.

So, when the user creates a new item, they can opt to create it from a "Template" item, which has all the fields already pre-defined.

What d'ya think ?

[Hyperus]

My 2 cents worth - when I finally discovered this on creditors, and set them correctly for each creditor , we got rid of all cost-centre issues with P/L each month - please try and keep this in . This defaulting on a per creditor basis is a real boon

/Hyp

[David.Simmonds]

I think that we need to be able to set the default GL accounts for the expenses in the Creditors - that is we need the Account detail at the Creditiors Account level. Maybe this means that we keep the same throughout the Debtors and the Inventory, to keep the usage standard.

David

[james.harper]

Just my $0.02 - I would like to see a NULL in the GL ID in each XX_Main table represent a default, so the values in each XX_Main table are override's only.

eg

IN_Classification
LedgerInvValue = X
LedgerMovement_COG = Y

IN_Main
LedgerInvValue = NULL
LedgerMovement_COG = Z (overrides IN_Classification)

so anything that processes an IN_Main record should actually see:

IN_Main
LedgerInvValue = X (defaulting from IN_Classification)
LedgerMovement_COG = Z (overriden by the IN_Main)

That would make my life easier, at the expense of yours Mike

[jspohio]

re classifications for Inventory and debtors.

I have clients who change the individual inventory GL accounts to point to different different sale & cost of sales account where the inventory belongs to a common group of items but for GL purposes may get attributed to different cost and sales accounts then in the group.

This is where the financial reporting wants different posting to the normal group.

The same applies to Debtors but in a smaller number of clients

Regards
Richard Collins

[medicalit]

I agree with James Harper - it's nice to see directly what is an override vs what is a merely an account pointer based on the classification. We use similar overrides in our software - at reporting time a simple table join and isNull() or coalesce() does the trick to take the NULLs and replace them with the values from the (in Jiwa's case) classifications table.

Having said that, we aren't making use of any overrides in the inventory area.

[Mike.Sheen]

Just my $0.02 - I would like to see a NULL in the GL ID in each XX_Main table represent a default, so the values in each XX_Main table are override's only.

What about this... We remove the GL columns from the XX_Main tables (keep 'em lean and mean).

We introduce a new table for each XX_Main table, XX_Main_GLOverride (or similar). Only *IF* there is a record present do we use those GL accounts, otherwise we use the classification ones.

That way, you can still control GL accounts per inventory item, debtor, etc, but it doesn't clutter the data structure, and determining the account to use is just a COALESCE of several columns.