Accounting HowTO
This article describes the practical issues of day to day accounting in Adempiere. Adempiere does a lot of the posting for you based in orders, shipments, customer invoices etc. However, the system doesn't completly run itself, there must be an accountant involved, paper must be filed, payments registered etc. Here are some hints that can make life with Adempiere easier.
Vendor invoices
In general, try to enter as much of your expense accounting as vendor invoices. Avoid using the manual general ledger for this.
Merchants
If you have a merchant company you will benefit from using the "Purchase Order" document flow which will create most vendor invoices for you if you have the vendor pricelists correctly set up.
For other invoices, ie rent, office supplies etc, see next section "Service company".
Service company
A service company doesn't primarily sell goods, so most vendor/expense invoices will be for expenses such as rent, electricity, office supplies etc.
To register these invoices I'd suggest that you create a special price list, ie "Costs" that you tie to each vendor from whom you purchase these kinds of services / supplies.
The products in the pricelist can for sake of simplicitys be named after your corresponding expense accounts in your chart of accounts. Make sure these products have the same revenue and expense account as the account they are representing.
Charge
Use charges for things that can't easily be accounted using a product. These things are for instance:
- Interest
- Bank fees
- Rounding
- Tax settlements
Avoid creating a lot of charges since that will make it hard to overlook. When you create a charge, first consider if it can be created as an expense type product.
