Re: Financial Accounting System (Questions)4 -- MIDRANGE-L

I can't address the problem directly but I can recommend that you take a careful look at CIMS and the way they did accounting. Written in 1978 (?) it has been a great model over the past 31 years. The biggest limitation it has (had) is that the number of elements, length of elements and total length of account number was artificially limited. Outside of that, I never saw it run out of gas. The Infinite Visions school accounting package uses nearly the same structure. CIMS is currently in use in school districts with half billion dollar budgets all the way down to federal government agencies of 10 million dollars. J&K Computers, original authors, ran its entire operation (20 million dollars at the time) on the account package. That gives you an idea of the flexibility.

The structure, which consisted of multiple elements, each defining a reporting, budgeting or expense element, allowed a entity to define what they needed. I know some small entities that have only two elements ( a fund and object code). I know some entities that use all 9 elements.

Where that structure was helpful was that users (staff and managers) could have filters set up that would restrict their access only to those accounts that were relevant to their functions. The filters used ??? to denote where in the account string they had access and where they didn't so rather than forcing a hierarchical structure into the account format for access control purposes, the account format was flexibly defined and then a users access was defined in the account filtering (account restrictions).

I have worked with it for so long that I don't really give it much thought and it has been a while since I have done training on the package so my recollection is a little hit and miss but you really can't do any better than the account structure in CIMS with the exception of removing the element length and account length restrictions.

Pete

Nathan Andelin wrote:

From: "ALopez"
The software I've used does this by having a simple Account/Fund structure ...

http://www.radile.com/rdweb/temp/gla100.html

I've been having a bit of trouble meshing "fund accounting" with the hierarchical structures you find in government organizations.

I'm making progress on a program for setting up "entities" and "entity accounts". The screen shots above depict a city government organization. Parks Department reports to Public Works, which reports to the City Manager, which reports to the City Council - for example. And a project manager in the Parks Department may be responsible for revitalizing Central Park.

It makes most sense (to me) to have project managers and department heads prepare budgets, and track revenue and expenses against budgets. Departments (entities) can be associated with "templates", which pulls in all accounts from the template, when you set up entities.

One problem I see in real life is that "funds" cross department boundaries - particularly the "general fund" in government. Making "everybody" responsible for a "fund" is a good way of making "nobody" responsible.

So my inclination is to budget and record financial activity by department. But in that case, I probably need some way to cross-reference back to the "general fund" which "nobody" is responsible for.

Anybody like to share an experience with this type of problem?

Nathan.