Requirements – Financial Consolidation (FC)
Blog: Biz-Performance, David Brown
Requirements – Financial Consolidation (FC)
General requirements
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The system must have the facility to define at least 10 independent companies, each with their own general ledger (i.e. one for each division) for consolidation.
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It must be possible for information to be consolidated across the independent general ledgers for month-end reporting purposes.
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Each general ledger can, if required, use a different structure for the group chart of accounts.
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Each general ledger can be held in a different currency.
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There should be a facility to consolidate different ranges of accounts at varying exchange rates.
Accounting periods
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The system should facilitate the consolidation of general ledgers using different accounting periods.
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Users must be able to define their own period start and end dates in the consolidation module.
Data input
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All codes entered must be validated online, and the code description displayed for visual checking.
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It should be possible to reproduce the chart of accounts from any of the general ledgers in the consolidation module as a basis for consolidation.
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The system should provide the facility to list all valid codes and their descriptions at points when codes are required to be entered.
Budgets
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The system must allow for at least two sets of budgets to be held against each consolidation account:
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original budget,
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forecast,
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other.
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The system must allow the following year’s budget(s) to be set up without overwriting the current year’s budget(s).
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It must be possible to budget at a higher level than that at whic transactions are input, ie some accounts are only budgeted at income/expense code level, others at sub-account level.
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There should be facilities for phasing an annual budget over the various accounting periods on the basis:
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of equal monthly apportionment,
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a monthly profile (of which there may be more than one).
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It should be possible for budgets to be generated automatically from a previous year’s actuals or budgets, with a percentage increase or decrease per account code range.
Transaction input
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The system must support batch control on input, with agreement of batch controls before acceptance for posting.
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Batch numbers will be system generated.
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Batches should be limited to a single period.
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Batches should be written to a holding file and be available for recall and modification before posting.
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It should be possible for valid batches to be posted selectively by the user.
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The system should provide the facility for users to define their own transaction types, eg month-end allocation journals.
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It is anticipated that the following fields will be held in the batch header:
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transaction type,
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transaction reference,
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transaction date,
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accounting period (unless automatically derived from the date).
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It is anticipated that the following fields will be held for each line item:
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account code,
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description (min 30 characters),
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value,
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debit/credit.
Enquiry faclities
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The following will be available on entry of an account code per period:
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net movement,
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budget and variance,
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previous year and variance.
Reporting
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The following reports must be available:
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trial balance,
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profit and loss account,
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balance sheet,
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net movement by account showing opening balance at start of the month, net transactions and closing balance,
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other ad hoc reports, particularly in relation to transactions.
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It is anticipated that most reports will be produced by means of an end-user report writer. Such a report writer should be able to access all data items in the database to enable a wide range of custom reports to be written.
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The report writer must be able to use the following values:
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current month actual,
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current month budget,
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current month last year,
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year to date actual,
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year to date budget,
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year to date last year,
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variances between actual and any of the budgets/prior year.
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It should support the following features:
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sort routines,
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extraction by criteria,
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control level breaks,
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suppression of zero prints,
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ability to round reports to the nearest thousand,
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automatic formatting,
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on-line viewing,
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variable width,
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user defined columns,
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user defined rows,
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arithmetic calculations horizontally,
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arithmetic calculations vertically.
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It should support the ability to define a range of account codes, so that each each account and its description and other selected fields are automatically displayed.
Consolidation routine
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It should be possible to consolidate one, several or all companies on request.
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The facility for reading general ledger data from a disk should be available when producing the consolidation file to avoid unnecessarily using up disk space.
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A flag should indicate the status of the consolidation system, i.e. whether the consolidation has been run, aborted, completed, etc.
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