Accounting Systems

Accounting covers much more than AR, AP, and cash. Cash flow, collections, payments, ROI, inventory, and cost analysis all end up on the finance team's desk, while the numbers behind them start in sales and operations systems.

Much of the work is integration. Orders, time entries, shipments, refunds, and vendor bills live in different systems, and true profitability only shows up when those costs are matched to the revenue they belong to. When a custom system hands transactions to an accounting package, posting through the package's own API or import format lets the package apply its own validation. Whether that path also enforces closed-period locks and other posting rules differs by package and version, so it is checked for the specific package rather than assumed. A reconciliation report listing each record sent, accepted, or rejected shows what actually reached the books.

Some numbers need to reach people without anyone running a report:

• an alert when a customer passes a credit limit or an invoice ages past terms
• a daily cash position assembled from bank and payment-processor data
• a dashboard of margin by job, product, or customer, with drill-in to the source transactions

Report design on its own is covered under Reporting.