Thanks for the feedback, Pete. I do have access to CIMS, and would like to support user defined account structures. But I want to steer clear of using the CIMS database itself to avoid any possible intellectual-property conflicts. Can you tell me if Infinite Visions is IBM i based?
So far, I allow up to 10 account "entity" segments. And entity segments can be up to 10 characters each. That offers quite a bit of flexibility. But it doesn't necessarily solve the problem of organizations that seem to want to budget one way, but record financial activity another. That may seem more like a policy problem than a technical problem, but it seems that the "powers that be" often look for technical solutions to policy problems. They organize their departments in hierarchical fashion, and give managers responsibility over operational aspects of business, but want to do financial accounting under a different structure. Wierd.
Nathan.
----- Original Message ----
From: Pete Helgren <Pete@xxxxxxxxxx>
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion <midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, March 27, 2009 10:25:25 AM
Subject: Re: Financial Accounting System (Questions)4
I can't address the problem directly but I can recommend that you take a
careful look at CIMS and the way they did accounting. Written in 1978
(?) it has been a great model over the past 31 years. The biggest
limitation it has (had) is that the number of elements, length of
elements and total length of account number was artificially limited.
Outside of that, I never saw it run out of gas. The Infinite Visions
school accounting package uses nearly the same structure. CIMS is
currently in use in school districts with half billion dollar budgets
all the way down to federal government agencies of 10 million dollars.
J&K Computers, original authors, ran its entire operation (20 million
dollars at the time) on the account package. That gives you an idea of
the flexibility.
The structure, which consisted of multiple elements, each defining a
reporting, budgeting or expense element, allowed a entity to define what
they needed. I know some small entities that have only two elements ( a
fund and object code). I know some entities that use all 9 elements.
Where that structure was helpful was that users (staff and managers)
could have filters set up that would restrict their access only to those
accounts that were relevant to their functions. The filters used ??? to
denote where in the account string they had access and where they didn't
so rather than forcing a hierarchical structure into the account format
for access control purposes, the account format was flexibly defined and
then a users access was defined in the account filtering (account
restrictions).
I have worked with it for so long that I don't really give it much
thought and it has been a while since I have done training on the
package so my recollection is a little hit and miss but you really can't
do any better than the account structure in CIMS with the exception of
removing the element length and account length restrictions.
Pete
midrange.com
