Friday, November 11, 2016

Requirements – Financial Consolidation (FC)

Requirements – Financial Consolidation (FC)

General requirements

  • 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.
  • It must be possible for information to be consolidated across the independent general ledgers for month-end reporting purposes.
  • Each general ledger can, if required, use a different structure for the group chart of accounts.
  • Each general ledger can be held in a different currency.
  • There should be a facility to consolidate different ranges of accounts at varying exchange rates.

Accounting periods

  • The system should facilitate the consolidation of general ledgers using different accounting periods.
  • Users must be able to define their own period start and end dates in the consolidation module.

Data input

  • All codes entered must be validated online, and the code description displayed for visual checking.
  • 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.
  • The system should provide the facility to list all valid codes and their descriptions at points when codes are required to be entered.

Budgets

  • The system must allow for at least two sets of budgets to be held against each consolidation account:
    • original budget,
    • forecast,
    • other.
  • The system must allow the following year's budget(s) to be set up without overwriting the current year's budget(s).
  • 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.
  • There should be facilities for phasing an annual budget over the various accounting periods on the basis:
    • of equal monthly apportionment,
    • a monthly profile (of which there may be more than one).
  • 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

  • The system must support batch control on input, with agreement of batch controls before acceptance for posting.
  • Batch numbers will be system generated.
  • Batches should be limited to a single period.
  • Batches should be written to a holding file and be available for recall and modification before posting.
  • It should be possible for valid batches to be posted selectively by the user.
  • The system should provide the facility for users to define their own transaction types, eg month-end allocation journals.
  • It is anticipated that the following fields will be held in the batch header:
    • transaction type,
    • transaction reference,
    • transaction date,
    • accounting period (unless automatically derived from the date).
  • It is anticipated that the following fields will be held for each line item:
    • account code,
    • description (min 30 characters),
    • value,
    • debit/credit.

Enquiry faclities

  • The following will be available on entry of an account code per period:
    • net movement,
    • budget and variance,
    • previous year and variance.

Reporting

  • The following reports must be available:
    • trial balance,
    • profit and loss account,
    • balance sheet,
    • net movement by account showing opening balance at start of the month, net transactions and closing balance,
    • other ad hoc reports, particularly in relation to transactions.
  • 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.
  • The report writer must be able to use the following values:
    • current month actual,
    • current month budget,
    • current month last year,
    • year to date actual,
    • year to date budget,
    • year to date last year,
    • variances between actual and any of the budgets/prior year.
  • It should support the following features:
    • sort routines,
    • extraction by criteria,
    • control level breaks,
    • suppression of zero prints,
    • ability to round reports to the nearest thousand,
    • automatic formatting,
    • on-line viewing,
    • variable width,
    • user defined columns,
    • user defined rows,
    • arithmetic calculations horizontally,
    • arithmetic calculations vertically.
    • 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


  • It should be possible to consolidate one, several or all companies on request.
  • 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.
  • 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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