Finance Services
The Finance Service is one of the core building blocks of our system. It provides support for creating statements, receiving payments, making adjustments, chart of accounts, journal reports, and batch maintenance
Chart of Accounts
The Chart Of Accounts maintains the list of available GL accounts. Our system tracks all financial transactions using double entry accounting techniques. A GL Account must be designated for each type of financial activity. The Chart of Accounts is setup during installation and configuration to meet the requirements of the specific application. Authorized users may create additional accounts as needed.
System Journal Ledger
All financial transactions will be recorded in the System Journal Ledger. The journal is a permanent record that enables accounting audits, centralized reporting, and exporting of financial information. Journal entries are grouped into balanced transactions that conform to double-entry accounting principles. Records cannot be deleted from the journal. If a correction is required an adjusting entry must be made to record the correction.
Generally, users will not need to review the journal records. Direct review of journal records will typically be limited to administrative users who are involved in auditing or adjustment functions.
Consolidated Statements
One of the most important features of the Finance Service is our Consolidated Statement. At set times the various application services, such as AVI, initiate the "make statement" pipeline process. Participating services will collect all the transactions relevant to the current statement period and generate a statement part.
Statement parts are segments of the Consolidated Statement created/provided by individual application services. All of the statement parts will be displayed as part of a consolidated account statement. For example, a ground transportation application will generate consolidated statements that are made from statement parts generated by Permit Service, AVI Service (trip fees), and Violation Service.
Each statement part shows a basic summary of information related to the associated application service. In addition, all finance transactions being reported for the statement period will be displayed. At a minimum, each transaction will show the date, description, and amount. If the service that "owns" the transaction offers more detail, the user can click on the transaction line and additional detail information will be displayed. The responsible application service will supply the detail information limiting dependancies between Finance Service.
Reports
The Finance Service provides support for defining and generating finance and sales reports from the journal ledger. The lowest level report is for a single "Batch" that is often used to generate shift sales summaries and the like. Additional reports for daily, weekly, etc., reports can be defined and generated. The report definition tools enable GL account summaries to arranged and sorted as desired.
Report definitions can be used to group and sort the information displayed in the reports. For example, all revenue GL accounts can be grouped under the heading "Sales", and all GL accounts related to taxes can grouped into a "Taxes" section if required. If section groups are not used each GL summary will be rendered on the report in alpha-numeric sort order of the GL account name.
All transactions occurring in the reporting period will be accounted on the report. If the report definition does not account for a GL account its information will be added at the end of the report. This way if a GL account is added to the Chart of Accounts some time after the report definition was made, it's report information will not be lost.
Receive Payments
Occasionally, payments will need to entered through the finance system. Operators will select the accounts the payment applies to and submit the payment. Payments will be written to the journal and will show up in the next statement.