Compiere from the Source

Financial Data Warehouse

Compiere is by design a financial data warehouse.

Old applications often offer a separate financial data warehouse to allow to use accounting data for decision making. The general approach is to transfer the (compressed) sub-ledger data to the general ledger and the in an additional step "enrich" this summarized GL info and store this in a financial data warehouse.

Compiere maintains all data on the lowest level of detail. This allows maintaining parallel summarization hierarchies for reporting. Example: you can maintain the old organization structure and the new one in parallel and use both of them for reporting. For your reporting, you can select from predefined accounting elements in addition to two user defined list and two user defined references.

The ready to use dimensions include owing organization, transaction organization (e.g. cost center), business partner, product, sales region, activity (for activity based costing), location (from and to - enabling regional value flow analysis), project (including phase and task), marketing campaign.  You can create multiple summarization structures for any of the accounting elements (i.e. dimensions for data warehousing).

Compiere does not require the data entry person to select/enter accounting information nor accounts. Example: the sales region can be derived from the sales rep - the marketing campaign could be derived from a coupon/voucher. As data entry personnel is motivated to finish the transactions as fast as possible (not necessarily to provide detailed information for management reporting), all information is derived from the transaction and default accounts.

Create custom Report

Compiere privides three types of reports:

1. Ad-hoc reports right from the Window Tab (click on the Report icom or ALT-R). You use the Search button to select the records you want to report on.
2. List Reports you start from the menu with optional parameters
3. Forms (like Invoices, ...)

All reporting in Compiere has two parts: The data ("model") and the format ("view").

You can have multiple views on the same model (Model Driven Architecture) - i.e. you use the invoice data to create a daily invoice report and a customer history report - you would use different columns, different sorting and different summary information, but it is based on the same data (model).  

In this posting, I'll concentrate on how to add a new model for reporting.  For that, you can use database tables directly, or database views.  The creation of a vew is much easier in Compiere, as you do not have to de-reference the fields.  Example: when you want to list the payment term of an invoice, you just add the column C_PaymentTerm_ID to the report, Compiere autimatically re-references the ID and prints the name of the payment term.  

When using a third party reporting tool, you would have to program the view to display the payment term name.  Also, in Compiere reporting, all security rules are automatically applied - example: if a user of the system would not have access to the payment term, you would have to create a separate report for that user. So, to create a custom report, you "just" have to create a database view.