Structural changes midstream

After an application is in production or even during implementation, users often request changes in the information structure. There are many reasons for change requests. During the use of the application, people realize that information is not needed or information is required for decision-making. Also, changes in the business may require the collection of additional information.

Most applications do not allow any change or a change requires the same effort as implementing it from scratch.

ALFOX ERP II allows the user (not an IT expert) to add, change or delete information dimensions at any time. The underlying OLAP (Online Analysis Processing) structure is maintained automatically.

Information Dimensions & Trees

ALFOX ERP II provides an extensive list of predefined dimensions: Organization Owning (balance sheet organization) Transacting (executing organization or service center) Natural Account Date & Time Transaction Accounting Product Product Category Business Partner Project Marketing Channel Campaign Location (Warehouse, Business Partner) From To Activity (for activity based costing) ALFOX ERP II allows the user to define additional dimensions. These dimensions can be validated via lists or table lookups. There is no overhead, if a dimension is not used.

All dimensions allow the definition of Trees. These summary levels allow reflecting the organization structure or the balance sheet and income statement positions.

Changes within the tree structure are possible at any time.

Every information dimension has a primary tree and can have additional summary trees. This may be required if you want to maintain the 'old' and 'new' structure for comparison - or if you need different parallel business partner hierarchies, e.g. one by Industry, another by Type (wholesale, retail, consumer).

Many applications do not have the ability to structure information dimensions, which results in unnecessary data entry and overhead. Example: if you want information on branch and division levels and divisions are made up of branches, you may have to enter the two fields branch and division and define rules, so that users cannot enter a wrong branch for a given division and vice versa.

Automatic Data Collection

Data entry needs to be as efficient as possible, which is equivalent to entering as few fields as possible. ALFOX ERP II provides a framework, which derives information automatically from the transaction context. Users can also select choices.

This is a significant advantage over other applications. For example, usually the Order Entry functionality is not 'aware' of the information needs of Customer Relationship functionality, this results in information that is not available or needs to be derived from existing data with subsequent loss of required detail.

Getting the information right from the source is a tremendous benefit. But, if the information is not needed, the user is not asked.

Combination of Dimensions

For reporting purposes, the user can slice and dice any combination of information dimensions. For all transactions the source and accounting currency information is maintained in addition to unit of measure and quantity.

You can view your financial results by Business Partner and Region or Product Group and time of day.

Where is my Book?

An Accounting Book is often defined as the combination of Chart of Accounts, Calendar, Currency, with implied accounting rules. ALFOX ERP II broadens that definition, storing the information on the lowest granularity. The traditional reporting is then just a summary level.

The information required for a business decision is often not found in traditional accounting systems, so additional data warehousing systems maintain parallel data to accommodate this need. ALFOX ERP II is based on a data warehousing architecture to allow flexible reporting. Let's use the time dimension as an example. In ALFOX ERP II, the detail for each transaction is stored. Therefore, transactions can be summarized in any way necessary, by hour of day, weekday or traditional accounting calendar period.

ALFOX ERP II maintains both, the accounting and transaction date. This is required for revenue recognition rules of service contracts or if the costs were for another period (next year's rent). If you need to account using different accounting principles (e.g. accrual and cash based), the accounting periods can be different. You can report using either view.

This bottom-up approach also allows meeting the Italian, French and Latin-American accounting requirements without artificial constructs. As the generation of accounting lines is rule based, no superfluous accounting lines are generated like in other applications. ALFOX ERP II makes the accounting easy to understand and reconcile. It even reconciles differences between disparate accounting methods (e.g. cash and accrual based or using different costing methods).

The summarized views are generated dynamically based on reporting needs using Materialized Views for performance.

Detailed information about Accounting , Accounting Rules and Costing.