Glossary

account categories — Groupings of accounts by purpose or by the nature of the accounts. Account categories allow for proper account groupings on financial reports and within what-if analyses. An example of these groupings is Cash. All cash accounts are grouped together within this category for proper reporting. SBCM provides a set of account categories to which you must map your account parts.

The actual account numbers used in all reports and analyses will be the numbers defined by the user in her source application. Account categories are used only for internal mapping purposes in the SBCM database.

account parts — A key field for each detail line imported by the CMA_LoadDetail function. Examples of account parts include GLAccount, Company, Department, Project, and Responsibility Area, or any other names used in defining company data. Each accounting package defines its own account parts, and within each package different companies can use different structures (any structures that are supported by the package). The account parts that you can define are usually limited by the system. For example, some systems allow only one account part — the prime account part (or natural account number). Other systems allow multiple account parts, such as department, customer, product, salesperson, and so forth. The more advanced systems allow user-defined account parts.

In some systems, the account number contains information about customers and vendors, in addition to the natural account number. In this case, if possible, the account number should be split into the natural account number and the account part or parts for defining what the remaining values represent.

beginning balance — The starting amount for an account. Every accounting system allows you to enter the beginning balances in the system. These balances are necessary for the system to account for financial transactions before the accounting system's start date. The filter imports this information to ensure that balances are accurate within SBCM.

communication point — Information that defines the means by which a company communicates with an organization or contact.

company — An entity for which an accounting system maintains accounting data.

contact — A person associated with an organization with which a given company does business.

data path — The full path and file name of a data file containing accounting information to be imported into SBCM.

detail line — An item in an invoice.

general ledger transactions — An array of transactions that includes amounts, quantities, account values, descriptions, and so on. This information allows the user to perform analyses on his or her general ledger information. Note that the filter imports all general ledger transactions.

import filter — A 32-bit Windows DLL used by the SBCM Import Wizard to bring data from other accounting systems into the SBCM central database.

Import Wizard — A component of SBCM that allows the user to import data from other accounting systems.

invoice header — The portion of an invoice that contains general information about the contents of the invoice.

journal entry — An item of data from an accounting system's data file.

organization — An entity with which a company does business.

package — An accounting software program in which data imported into the SBCM database was created.

party — An organization or contact with which a company communicates or does business.

rollups — Reporting associations that allow you to group detailed information so that you can view or report information at a more summarized level. For example, Region or City/State might be a rollup for the Customer category. This allows for reports on customers grouped by Region or City/State. With most systems, you can establish different rollup structures so that you can use different types of financial reporting within the same system.

system information — Pertinent system information such as company name, accounting periods, current fiscal year, and so on. The current version of SBCM provides support for 12-period accounting.

views — Pre-designed instructions (or queries) that obtain specific information from your database and display it for you to analyze. Also known as "business rules."