Tuesday, September 19, 2006

Posted and unposted transactions

According to Todd Boyle in www.ledgerism.net there is a requirement to be able to post incomplete transactions, tagged as uposted. In the page UEEN he states:

1. Modern GLs should include (permit entry) of Unposted as well as
Posted information. Unposted information is subject to fewer constraints,
and may include any valid business information formatted as a GL entry or
entries. "Posted" information however, is fully compliant traditional
double entry GL data with account classifications. For example, an modern
GL may have a boolean "IsPosted" flag, to distinguish between real CDEA trial
balance and other business reports.
4. Modern GLs should not enforce
balanced journal entries (require balanced books) at time of entry of "unposted"
transactions. Acknowledges that single entries to the books are an
inherent part of unfinished business processes. Enforces, however, that a
single entry must be accompanied by an identifier to its previous or
anticipated, future related entry(ies). This may include references to
contract, party, collaboration instance, or other data sufficient for generating
a balancing claim. (Enforces balanced entries only as part of
the closing of books stage of the value chain.) The suggested name
for this identifier, which associates entry rows into balanced transactions, is
"TransactionID".


And in the page LedgerOntology he adds:
7. No longer Requires the account code or classification be present
at time of entry of unposted transactions, i.e., the NDEA GL contains data at
earlier points in the business process than the point at which GAAP
classifications are present or in some case possible.

To meet these reasonable requirement I'm considering adding the column "Posted" to the Journal table of GL21 Open Source project.