What the Money Management Processses Do

Introduction to Financials Module

In opentaps the Financials module includes items traditionally called an accounting system, and also the functionality often called bookkeeping, plus analysis and reports associated with business "financials". But, the Financials module in opentaps comes with one huge difference, it is already fully integrated with every business-operations process that you have chosen to use in the opentaps system.

The value of this to small business owners is very important indeed. Rather than being concerned with the mechanics of financial report preparation, accounting routines, and bookkeeping chores, you can focus on the really important things, like:

• driving the business where you want it to go,
• keeping an eye on sales productivity, and marketing program effectiveness,
• optimizing your production activities, or
• dealing effectively with the market dynamics and your competition, and
• planning the resources and money you will need for your business journey.

In other words, you get the time to command the ship, rather than manning the oars so much of the time. Figure 5 is a depiction of the various areas of automated functionality provided by the opentaps Financials module.

For an introduction to Accounting systems concepts, please refer to Introduction to Accounting Systems.

Basics of Accounting

In this picture, we can see some basic accounting items that are visible at the "Tab" level in opentaps accounting system:

• Accounts receivable
• Accounts payable
• Payroll
• Ledger and Chart of Accounts

Other standard functions contained in the system accounting package include:

• Transaction support, refer to [[Ledger Transactions Reference

]]

• Reconciliation and Adjustments, refer to Reconciliation
• Exchange Rates, refer to Exchange Rates
• Time Periods, refer to Time Periods
• Payment Methods, refer to Payment Methods

Some traditional accounting functions are distributed in the integrated system, into areas that actually drive data capture, and the functionality of accouting is then automated:

• Order entry -- is included in CRM/SFA (The_Orders_Tab), and in Purchasing (Purchasing (Orders Tab)).
• Inventory control -- is included in Purchasing, MRP, and Warehouse
• Cost accounting -- is integrated with several cost capturing areas
• Fixed assets accounting -- is called Asset Maintenance, refer to Managing Fixed Assets

Additional special Financials Module Tabs are also provided:

• Partners Tab -- for supporting Sales Partners with Agreements and Invoices, and
• Reports Tab -- for producing Financial and Accounting Reports.

Accounting Tags Feature

Accounting Tags are provided in the opentaps system for use with various transactions to associate them with an operating unit or category of analysis for which you want to generate specific Financial Reports, refer to Accounting Tags.