Statistical & Financial Ledger Overview

The Statistical and Financial Ledger (SFL) was designed to allow structuring of financial and statistical accumulations to match the operations of any organization. The designers have avoided “hard coding” any predetermined accounting structures, thus allowing total flexibility to define both financial and statistical elements and accumulation paths. A built-in calendar allows period definition that matches operational as well as financial requirements.

SFL comes with a rich set of data entry and maintenance tools as well as a powerful and user-friendly report writer to take full advantage of the flexibility provided in structural definition. Large volumes of financial and statistical data may be processed, analyzed, and reported on in a timely and meaningful manner.

Data Structures

Data is accumulated through a user-defined hierarchy of ledgers, account numbers, data elements, and data segments—each with its own security that offers restricted access to the responsible manager without compromising the integrity of the system. The built-in calendar maintains operating information at levels never before possible. Users can identify and track activity for each shift of each work day of each financial period for up to nine years.

SFL’s unlimited sub-ledgers let you monitor project costs, plant assets, employee safety performance, or any other operating activity. Ledgers can be linked. For example, a single entry might update an employee ledger and a project ledger as well as the central general ledger. Ledgers may close with the financial period or be held open to record all costs against a project which transcends a financial year.

SFL’s account number can be as long as 32 alphanumeric characters and can consist of up to ten data elements. Each ledger can support a unique model. A data element can be as large as 32 characters or as small as one character. Data elements define the operational structure (division, region, department, manufacturing line, piece of equipment, or employee). There is no need to worry about a left-to-right hierarchical consolidation as each element can be reported based on any consolidation structure. SFL has virtually no limit on data segments associated with an account number. Data segments can support statistical and value accumulations or can remain static as in hourly rates or currency exchange rates.

Actual and budget values and statistics are easily accumulated whether production is measured in units of each or tons, and cost in minutes or feet. SFL’s calendar can maintain distinct periods from shift to financial year. Postings are made to the lowest level defined by the user. The user can easily report on shift operations and produce interim financial reports—as well as support traditional monthly, quarterly, and annual financial reporting periods—by defining period accumulations.

Data Entry & Maintenance

Data entry is managed through journals or through the Data Distribution Manager (DDM) which integrates SFL with other OCS and non-OCS applications. A built-in scheduler enables user-unattended journal creation, listing, posting, and report generation. SFL’s journal types include standard entries, accrual and reversing entries, estimating entries, intercompany entries, and inter-ledger entries. Accrual entries can be scheduled for reversal in any future period in conjunction with the system calendar. An estimating entry is used within a financial period to estimate revenue and costs for interim statement development. Estimating entries are reversed in the same financial period and all transaction detail is removed from the systems.

Data Distribution journalizes transactions in subsystems, such as Accounts Payable, Materials Management, and Maintenance Management. DDM integrates SFL with Excel or other ASCII-interfaced applications, supporting both downloading and uploading of data. The built-in scheduler allows sequential definition of processes to be run unattended. The natural posting order of transactions can be maintained in the unattended environment, journals can be created and posted, and financial reports produced overnight—ready for presentation in the morning.

SFL’s journal entry tool set includes journal templates and allocation models. Journal templates can be defined to allow journal creation without reentry of account numbers and descriptions. Journals can be automatically created to allocate account values based on predefined fixed or variable relationships. The relationships can represent statistical or value accumulations (overhead allocated to departments based upon the total hours worked during the period).

Inquiries & Reports

The user-defined capabilities extend to the inquiry and reporting functions. The process can be repeated with a few simple keystrokes by simply assigning a name to an inquiry or report definition. SFL Inquiry allows the user to analyze transactions by account number, reference code, and transaction code (sales journal, payroll journal, etc.). Inquiries can transcend ledgers and follow a value from the highest level of reporting to the detail of the transaction entered.

SFL reports provide the user with total control in report definition. The easy-to-use report writer allows for complete column definition of accumulations plus columns resulting from mathematical calculations. Rows define accumulations of account numbers. A complete set of tools allows range definition, wild-card accumulations, and multilevel sorts based on data elements and character position within a data element. Formatting tools provide flexible totaling, sign control, zero balance suppression, and reclassification of accounts for which there is an unnatural debit or credit balance.

Reporting structures can be defined to consolidate posting level accounts into account groups that satisfy many reporting requirements, including consolidations of unlike operations, regulatory reporting, etc. Structures are physical records and support full inquiry. Reports can be exported to create special presentations, including graphical presentations, using ASCII export. The TODAY report generator, available to all TODAY applications, can be used to create special or ad-hoc reports

Manage Costs

The SFL can capture costs and a very fine level such as per shift per component, as the information is automatically captured by the OCS modules no additional work is required by the finance department to manage costs at this level. This allows for very accurate costing.

• Operational Budgeting & Costing. Give operational manager access to their own budgets and costs. The flexible inquiry tools mean that no longer does the finance department have to spend valuable time collating operational type reports.
• Corporate & Statutory Reporting. SFL will produce all the reports required for your corporate & statutory needs.
• Supporting Statistical Information. Financial reporting is no longer enough to give a true picture of your costs. Many costs are of a variable nature and require support statistical information such as hours of operations, tons mined, product produced etc. to support the variable nature of the costs.

Financial & Statistical Data

• Flexible data collection methods
• Automatic information feed from all OCS modules
• Open interface to third party and custom applications
• Combine both financial and statistical information into reports