Management Indicators Company Financial Analysis

180 181 CHAPTER FIFTEEN CONFIGURING ACCOUNTS FROM A TO Z Accounts must be configured to meet your company’s needs. This chapter explains how to modify your chart of accounts, journals, access rights, initial account balances, and default values for the initial configuration of your Open ERP accounts. Assuming that it calculates sufficiently accurately, the best accounting software would be marked out by its usability and simplicity of data entry, and flexibility in configuring its different components. You would be able to easily modify the accounting module to meet your own needs so that you could optimize it for the way you want to use it. Open ERP lets you adapt and reconfigure many functions to ease the task of data entry: • adding controls for data entry, • customizing the screens, • filling fields automatically during data entry with data that is already known to the system. For this chapter you should start with a fresh database that includes demo data, with sale and its dependencies installed and no particular chart of accounts configured.

15.1 Chart of Accounts

You view active charts of accounts using the menu Accounting → Charts → Charts of Accounts, and Open Charts for the selected year and account moves. Note: Hierarchical charts Most accounting software packages represent their charts of accounts in the form of a list. You can do this in Open ERP as well if you want to, but its tree view offers several advantages: • it lets you show and calculate only the accounts that interest you, • it enables you to get a global view of accounts when you show only summary accounts, • it simplifies searches semantically, • it is more intuitive, because you can search for accounts on the basis of their classification, • it is flexible because you can easily restructure them. The structure of the chart of accounts is hierarchical, with account subtotals called account views. You can develop a set of account views to contain only those elements that interest you. To get the detail of the account entries that are important to you, all you need to do is click the account’s Code if you have no codes, you can select the line, then click Switch to get the acount definition, then click the Entries in the LINKS part of the toolbar. Displaying the chart of accounts can take several seconds because Open ERP calculates the debits, credits and balance for each account in real time.