Accounting Engine
The FinancialForce accounting engine is a central set of capabilities and design principles that power FinancialForce applications. These accounting components permeate the entire system, providing a rich and uniform user experience across all accounting functions. This foundation makes FinancialForce Accounting a simple, yet powerful, accounting application that is straightforward to learn, easy to implement and trouble-free to maintain.
The accounting engine includes:
Single, Unified Ledger
Unlike financial applications built around mainframe and on-premise design principles, FinancialForce.com chose to build a system that fully leverages the cloud technology and has a multi-tenanted architecture built in from the ground up. Rather than construct a system based on old-style department boundaries with individual software modules that pass information waterfall style from one module to another, FinancialForce.com has built a single, real-time solution that provides just one system to learn and use. This means that functions such as Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable and General Ledger are all contained in a single, self-balancing set of books - a single ledger.
This unique single system design eliminates time lags, sub-ledgers, data fragmentation, reconciling and unnecessary integration between sub-systems. In contrast to batch or waterfall-styled ERP solutions, it ensures that your business data is consistent, always in balance and always up to date. Changes can efficiently be made in ONE area without: losing control, creating reporting problems or increasing the risk of non-compliance. This is because data is held within a single system – in one accounting application – not in multiple sub-modules and sub-systems. FinancialForce Accounting is guaranteed to be in balance.
When compared to the cumbersome accounting systems of the past, the ingenious simplicity and unassuming power of the single ledger is a financial manager’s dream. The benefits of the single ledger include:
- 100% real-time system
- No sub-module reconciling
- Faster period close, including perpetual or virtual closes
- Serves a single financial database as a platform for collaborative accounting
- Only one system to learn and implement
- Easy to cross-train users across functions such as AR and AP
- Inherent and ironclad audit trail
- Natural drill down and drill through
Chart of Accounts Dimensions
The FinancialForce accounting engine provides a new and more advanced approach to capturing financial information in what are called “dimensions”, which are far superior to the typical “Code Block” structures found in most accounting systems. The system provides the ability to define or model chart of account dimensions around the information needs of your business, whether you want to configure a Project Ledger, Expense Ledger, Asset Ledger, or set up a more tailored ledger to your specific requirements.
If you are struggling with chart of accounts limitations on your current system, be sure to investigate FinancialForce Accounting’s multi-dimensional approach. The benefits include:
- Unlimited ways to classify, analyze, model and measure your business
- Simple to add, change and maintain
- Supports dissimilar account coding structures within one set of books
- Provides reporting dimensions above and beyond the chart of account structures
- User-defined project work breakdown structures
- Allows for supplier, customer, and employee analysis
Read more about FinancialForce analytics.
Accounting Components
With the single ledger as a centerpiece, FinancialForce.com has created a series of powerful accounting components to surround it. These universal accounting components enable FinancialForce.com to deliver a more robust and uniform application across all aspects of the systems. This eliminates the patchy functionality problem found in modular systems – such as when multicurrency is fully supported in AP but not AR. Universal accounting components also provide advanced capabilities that cannot be found in other solutions. For instance, the payment system can be used to pay refunds to customers, without having to set up redundant records in Accounts Payable. And finally, the accounting components simplify training because actions and interactions are consistent across all functions in the application.
Learn more about the following accounting components:
Benefits of FinancialForce accounting components include:
- Consistent functionality across all areas, making FinancialForce Accounting easier to learn
- Easier to cross-train employees
- Rich and robust capabilities are available universally such as multicurrency
- Accounting components are designed to be shared or programmatically accessed by other applications
Read more about FinancialForce Accounting on our products page »
FinancialForce Accounting overview
