Compiere from the Source

Financial Consolidation

Consolidation of the financial data of companies can be a very complex process, especially if companies span national boundaries (the term company and organization here are synonyms).

Compiere makes most of the consolidation tasks surprisingly easy. Let's use a simple example: You have a production company and a distribution company. Compiere has a counter-document feature which automatically creates the document in the other company or organization. So, if you create a purchase order in the distribution company it creates a sales order in the production company. Our counter document feature is heavily used in the distribution industry between headquarter and (semi-) independent stores or outlets. With minimum overhead you can  even completely automate the supply chain tasks within your organization.

This approach also uses explicit transfer prices - eliminating the need for inter-company profit elimination. You now can create individual or consolidated transaction and financial reports, just by selecting the specific organization or some grouping of organizations or companies.

Compiere maintains company or organization hierarchies for control and reporting purposes. As you can have multiple hierarchies in parallel, you can easily simulate the effects of company reorganizations on financial statements - before or after the event. If you change the organization you can change the hierarchy directly or if you build another hierarchy of the organization, you can then just switch your primary hierarchy, and could continue reporting using any other hierarchy.

Create additional Accounting Schema

You may have a situation when you determine that you need an additional Accounting Schema.  Perhaps you have a new subsidiary that requires the creation of financial reports in a different currency, or you may want to use a different account element structure for your tax reporting as opposed to your general financial reporting. 

The designed flexibility of Compiere allows you to address either of these situations (as well as many others) at any time by adding an additional Accounting Schema.

Schedule Processes in Compiere

Compiere allows to schedule any process or report and run them based on a set of dynamic parameters. You can execute batch process or generate reports on a regular basis.

The Schedule defines when it is run and how often. You can define particular week days or month days in addition to flexible frequencies (every two days/weeks/...). You can optionally restrict the execution to certain week days and time windows. Compiere supports multiple application servers for load balancing. In the schedule you can restrict the execution to certain servers or set of servers.

The Scheduler determines the process or report to run. It is easy to write your own process in the Compiere framework extending the class SvrProcess - or you run any of the currently 270 core processes or reports in Compiere. The parameters can be hardcoded or use dynamic variables, like @Date@ for the current date or @AD_Org_ID@ for the current organization. The power of the scheduler is in it's ability to define a list of result recipients. This allows the Scheduler to be used for report bursting to a set of individual users or groups (roles). The recipients are not restricted to internal users, but can include also external consultants or business partners. You can send the results either via email - the result is then added as a PDF document - or via a Notice. You can view Notices in the Swing or Web user interface - or in the Self-Service (Web Store) part of the application. The latter also allows external parties to view their Notices and it is a user preference if you want to receive emails and/ or notices.

You could also start processes from operating system schedulers. This approach might be preferred for importing data when the process should be started after the new data or file is available. You could also do polling from Compiere processes directly. The option you select is an implementation choice. You can also start workflows from batch, but here, we just concentrate on starting a process in this posting. The easiest way to start a process is to code a static Java "main" method as follows:

Create Price List in another currency

As you know, Compiere allows for multi currency transactions. This means that you can have a Sales Order or Invoice in one currency, a Payment in another currency and do your Financial Reporting in a third. The currency used in an Order or Invoice is controlled by the Price List. Setting up a Price List in a different currency is a simple process.

Let's assume that you want to take and existing Sales Price List in USD and you want an additional Sales Price List in EUR. Just follow these steps: