Compiere from the Source

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.

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:

What happened to my customization?

Compiere provides seamless version migration

To be successful, there are just some rules to consider. Let's use an example for clarification: You create a new column in an existing table. Automatically, Compiere sets the Entity Type to User Maintained. With this, the column will also be there after the migration. You then add your new Field to an existing Tab of a Window. Again by default the Entity Type is User Maintained and your changes are independent from any changes of the core product.

The worst thing which could happen is that the exact position is not maintained. One option is to put the field at the end of the tab - another is that you manually enter the sequence number. By default, the field sequence is 10, 20, 30, ... - so of you manually enter a sequence, e.g. 25 - your position is very likely to be preserved. This works very well if you want to add a few columns to an existing table and window. Another scenario is that you want to restructure the default window - quite often to display only the used fields in that particular situation. The best option here is to create your own window - just copy the existing window and then remove the columns/tabs not needed.

Where is my Compiere Accounting Information?

A common question I have seen is Why do I get the message 'With your current role and settings you cannot view this information' or Why can't I see the Not Posted / Posted button on Documents?

By its nature, accounting information contains sensitive data and companies generally want to restrict access.  In Compiere this is done through a combination of Security and Preferences.

In Compiere, accounting information can be accessed in a number of ways. These include windows like Accounting Fact Details, Account Elements, Accounting tabs, the Posted button on Documents and the Account Info window.  The challenge in security is to ensure that you can restrict access from any angle or access vehicle. 

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.