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Financials

Functional Highlights Financial Accounting

The center stage in AS-Lingo is its Financial Accounting and Controlling System which covers today’s expectations of a modern accounting system and is compliant with requirements of GoBS, GAAP and GDPdU.

AS-Lingo Financials shows the whole financial picture of your organisation, highlighting exceptional events and giving you better insight into your performance. With AS-Lingo you can automate many manual processes and be up to date with your business processes when ever and where ever you are in the world. With AS-Lingo Financials, you’ll spend more time planning your company’s future.

What can AS-Lingo Financials do for you? These are the most important items:

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General Ledger Accounts

AS-Lingo is a truly global system – designed to comply with any accounting and controlling legislation in any country world wide.

In AS-Lingo you can choose to use any of the standard Ledgers available world wide or you can decide to use your own ledger.

If you are a subsidiary of a global enterprise, then you may be located in a country where specific ledgers are mandatory. That’s not a problem in AS-Lingo because ledgers can be mapped to comply with any central corporate ledger to enable consolidation in a global environment.

Ledgers can be closed temporarily and individual ledgers can be closed while others may still be open for further transactions and posting of journal entries.

GL-Accounts can also be Open Item Accounts (e.g. Check Transition Account) and work with Due Data Information.

You can also assign GL-Accounts to any number of Dimensions.

Dimensions allow you to assign accounts or transactions to business relevant entities and thus connect transactions to be viewed and reported from many different aspects of your business. You could for example take a look at your companies performance from the point of view of a project, a department or a specific product range that has recently been introduced to the market.

Sub-Ledger Accounts Payable

A simple scenario showing how easy it is to automate a complex process in AS-Lingo:

  1. Let AS-Lingo create a payment proposal or direct debit proposal with just a single mouse-click.
  2. Edit the proposal online to make changes to vendor account transactions to delete, postpone or add payments as needed and print the proposal for audit purposes.
  3. One more click to release the proposal for payment and pick up all the reports from AS-Lingo’s Document Manager where you’ll find
    • the cover letters to be sent/emailed to your suppliers and also
    • the payment lists and audit reports showing the details of the payment / direct debit process
    • the payment file(s) which you can (automatically) transmit to you bank(s) for clearing

All Payments have now been allocated to the open items on the vendor accounts.

Escape the productivity-draining manual processes of accounts payable. With AS-Lingo, your finance team can automate tactical vendor management workflows across the entire accounts payable process with increased speed and efficiency. That means more focus on high-value analyses, insights, and cash flow optimisation—and less frustration and wasted time.

Save hours every day by automating manual accounts payable processes and streamlining inefficient workflows. Point and click to configure the approvals process that works for you. Take advantage of automated expense allocations when you pay bills. AS-Lingo makes you more efficient.

With AS-Lingo, you can track and view payments, approvals, and reports—anytime, anywhere. Now you can see your accounts payable liabilities, vendor aging reports, and bill and check register reports in real time.

AS-Lingo’s automated and configurable processes enhance internal controls. You define the workflows, approvals, and internal controls to align with the way your business operates. That also means you have visibility into the entire accounts payable process to ensure accountability.

Sub-Ledger Accounts Receivable

Proper management of invoicing, credit terms, and other accounts receivable tasks accelerates your cash flows and keeps your organisation strong. AS-Lingo automates invoicing and collections processes to give you fast, efficient, and automated accounts receivable management. That accelerates the cash cycle, improves your business performance, and improves customer satisfaction.

AS-Lingo lets you automate your processes, send invoices by email, and offer more payment options to customers. Generate recurring bills for easy subscription management, attach customer documents to transactions for better record keeping, and more.

Connect accounts receivable to the rest of the business for a financially consistent view. AS-Lingo gives you a single view of quotes, sales orders, and invoices. Order transactions are automatically linked to your general ledger and accounts receivable ledger, so you can streamline billing and accounting. And it offers up-to-date, accurate sales tax calculations.

AS-Lingo gives you real-time visibility with built-in and configurable reporting. Get a complete picture of customer aging, invoice analyses, recurring invoices, deferred revenue, and more. AS-Lingo lets you analyse your accounts receivable data by a variety of business drivers, which you yourself can create, for a complete view from every perspective.

Do you want to reduce costs and improve cash flow? Using AS-Lingo Collections, efficiently manage customer communications with a structured and automated process that sends customers configurable reminders, lets you assign owners to collection cases to ensure accountability, and centrally records all activity.

With AS-Lingo you can

  • Achieve healthier cash flows by shortening invoicing and payment cycles
  • Make collections painless with automated dunning and collection notices
  • Gain real-time visibility into customer histories, aging balances, and more with configurable dashboards and reports

Postings/Transactions

Accounting transactions hold any number of  postings (to an account) and are held in journal entries (vouchers) which in turn are held in posting folders. A posting folder can contain any number of journal entries. A journal entry usually consist of 2 to 5 postings – sometimes a few hundred, as could be in the case of entries to cash or to project accounts. Transactions can be entered interactively or in batch-mode from feeder systems.

Transactions can be posted in any currency and are stored in the system in foreign currency and local currency. See also Currencies.

The minimum information contained in a journal entry are voucher number, voucher date and posting date which assigns the entry to the period denoted by the posting date. Each voucher consists of at least two postings containing the account allocation, the amount and a posting text.

Additional assignments within the transaction can be entered to e.g. cost centre, cost unit, project or any of the dimensions defined in your environment.

To commit an entry it must be balanced within all used currencies.

Foreign Currency and Currency Conversion

Any transaction in AS-Lingo can be posted in any currency.

The three components of a foreign currency transaction are:

foreign currency amount
local currency amount and
exchange rate

When posting a transaction in foreign currency, any combination of only two of the three components is entered and the third will be calculated.

You can enter

an individual exchange rate
a daily rate or
a monthly rate

Four exchange rates per day/month are held in AS-Lingo:

Debit
Credit
Bid and
Asked

If only the foreign currency amount is entered, then the active bid rate is used for debit postings and the active asked rate is used for credit postings to calculate the local amount. If only the local amount is entered, foreign currency aspects are ignored

Outgoing Invoices

Outgoing Invoices are normally posted under their original invoice number.
For AS-Lingo this is an external voucher number. Document numbers must be unique within the same year and therefore input is monitored to check that invoices are not posted more than once.

The contra posting is then assigned to a revenue account which in turn assigns the tax key to the posting. This allows for varying VAT% in split postings. All taxes are automatically calculated and posted.

EU-Turnover is recognised by the presence of a customers VAT-ID and an EU-Tax- Account- and Key are automatically assumed. This results in an automatic posting to so called pseudo revenue accounts. The quarterly consolidated EU VAT-Reports are processed via these accounts.

Incoming Invoices

Incoming Invoices are normally posted with an automatically assigned document number – an internal number. Monitoring for double entries cannot therefore be done using the document number.

Checking for multiple input is therefore done using the suppliers invoice number. AS-Lingo verifies during data entry that no document was entered with the same suppliers invoice number within that month.

The contra posting is then assigned to an expense account which in turn assigns the tax key to the posting. This allows for varying VAT% in split postings.

In countries where Tax Validation Reports are not mandatory for pretax, the expense account need not have a pretax key assigned to it. In this case, the tax key is entered with the posting transaction.

EU-Acquisition is recognised by the presence of a customers VAT-ID and an EU-Tax- Account- and Key are automatically assumed. The EU-Expense-Accounts has an EU-Aquisition-Tax-Key assigned to it and the tax posting is automatically created by AS-Lingo during the transaction. The quarterly consolidated EU VAT-Reports include the EU-Acquisition-Tax-Report.

Incoming Payments

Incoming payments are allocated to open items (e.g. invoices). However, payments often do not match the open items (e.g. customers deduct the wrong discount amount – discount is partly or totally overdue), leaving the user with the decision of what to do with difference.

If the undue deduction is under the limit defined by you, then AS-Lingo will automatically post the difference (adjustment posting) while allocating and matching the open items of that transaction. The correct part of the deducted discount is automatically posted to a discount expense account and the unjustified part of the deduction is automatically posted to another miscellaneous expense account. The correction of the VAT involved in the transaction is automatically posted to the relevant tax accounts.

If the undue deduction is over the limit you defined, then AS-Lingo will not make an automatic adjustment posting. Instead the user must manually post the difference (as required by the law in most countries), either as an adjustment posting or by re-entering the difference as a new taxable receivables open item. A more transparent handling of a case like this would however be, not to allocate the payment but leave it open until the outstanding payments are received, or until a credit note has been issued to match the difference.

Outgoing payments

Outgoing payments are rarely posted manually – they are usually processed as part of an automatic payment procedure – see Payment Processing for more information.

Manually processed outgoing payments are a similar procedure as described in incoming payments.

Recurring Entries

Recurring entries are held in a dedicated folder as a pattern for journal entries to be generated at a predefined point in time. At regular intervals, these folders are scanned for possible due items to created and posted.

These patterns (model journal entries) include information such as

  • from when
  • how often
  • until when

The entries are selected by these criteria and automatically processed. The patterns can also be marked as “to be deleted after the last date of processing”. If not marked, they can be deleted/updated manually. The eligible user has display and maintenance functions to control the recurring entries.

Account Cleanup

Account maintenance allows cleanup of accounts without necessarily processing posting transactions to that account. However, if unexpected postings are necessary to adjust miscellaneous differences caused by unjustified deductions, then these may also be posted here.

Fast Posting Input

An alternative to the standard posting panel is the Speed Posting Input Panel. This panel allows even more flexibility of adaption for the user than the standard posting panel. This panel also has much of the behaviour of an Excel-Sheet.

Payment Proposals

Payment proposals and direct debit proposals (customers only) in AS-Lingo can be created at any time. Payment proposals are normally produced to generate payments for suppliers, but repayments of credits to customers can also be processed.

A proposal can be edited and printed. During editing, accounts can be removed from or added to the proposal. Within an account, open items can also be included or excluded from the proposal. An item may also be excluded automatically by changing its due date or the payment condition assigned.

Any changes in the proposal will immediately show up the altered liabilities (payments) or receivables (direct debit) for the overall proposal.

Finally the payment banks are allocated with or without a payment amount limitation. Every payment method must have at least one payment bank allocated to it without limitation. After this, the payment proposal can be released for payment.

Payment Processing

After payment proposals have been released, they can be processed for payment at any time.

Payments are created and posted to the accounts. Allocation and matching of open items (payable / receivables) is done and the relevant tax correction postings are created for the appropriate tax accounts.

A list of credit/debit notes is printed.

Payments / Direct Debits are placed in a SEPA file on the server, ready to be transferred to the paying bank or to the central clearing server.

A cover letter is printed. The following rules apply to the creation of cover letters:

  1. Cover letters are printed for all suppliers / customers in the payment process.
  2. Cover letters are printed only if the payment details exceed the limitations of the SEPA specifications.

Arrears/Dunning Letters

You can define the number of arrears/dunning levels in AS-Lingo. Overdue open items are included in reminders or arrears/dunning letters and automatically updated to the next arrears level. When the highest arrears level is reached, the case is referred to the legal department and the creation of further arrears letters is discontinued until there are no more open items with the highest arrears level.

After all items with the highest arrears level are settled, the dispatching of arrears letters is resumed.

Before actually creating the reminders, a proposal of outstanding reminders can be run any time.

The date of the last arrears letter is held in each account. Reminders letters can be processed every day. The reminders interval (number of days between two notifications) is set as a parameter for arrears processing. This enables a more accurate arrears processing result.

Reporting

AS-Lingo reporting includes all reports initiated by the user or by the system. These reports can be saved on the server, printed or electronically transferred (e.g. journals, balance sheets or account statements).

See more about reporting in AS-Lingo.

Journals

All financial transactions in the system are set out in a base journal – a legal requirement. Additional journals can be created and processed at any time. Any additional journal is a subset of the base journal and is defined in the account as a specific journal type.

A new journal can be created at any time by the user in an open period. A journal cannot span more than one period. One period can contain more than one journal. The new journal is assigned to all postings in the relevant period that have not already been assigned to a journal.

Journals can be printed any time, provided the transactions have not been archived.

Account Statements

Display

Display functions are those transactions that are used for information retrieval, showing e.g. account, or document data.

Printing

The printing of account statements and other reports is initialised on-line. The output is a PDF-File which can be printed on-line or sent.

Voucher Display

Displaying a document can be activated in various ways. The function can be selected from the navigation tree view, or directly from the context menu of a posting displayed in an account display or other posting display functions.

Profit and Loss Statement

The profit and loss statement is available in the form of a balance account list or in a structured format.

Balance Sheets

The balance sheet is available in the form of a balance account list or in a structured format.

Cost Centers

Cost centers can be defined and posting transactions assigned to them. Mostly these additional account allocations refer to expenses derived from incoming invoices and can be enforced through an entry in the appropriate account.

Cash-Flow

Cash commitment report

Shows the liabilities on supplier accounts in the next aa, bb, cc and dd days where aa through dd are parameters that are set when the report is initiated.

Age Structure of Liabilities and Receivables

Shows the receivables on customer accounts in the next t1, t2, t3 and t4 days where t1 through t4 are parameters that are set when the report is initiated.

Tax Validation Report

Tax validation begins when entering a voucher during posting transaction input. Accumulative tax validation reports can also be created for a journal (several days) or for a whole period (month). A tax validation report shows the VAT, the revenue, the revenue adjustments and possible differences.

Preliminary Tax Report

Printing of the preliminary tax report and the Fiscal-Tax-Interface to the Financial Authorities are available.

Quarterly EU Tax Report

The quarterly summery reports include all EU Turnover- and Acquisition-Transactions and the relevant tax for validation purposes. These can be uploaded to the relevant EU-Portals.

Monthly Summary

In AS-Lingo-Financial there are 13 Posting-Periods (01 bis 12 and the late entry period for the previous year). Currently the fiscal year is identical to calendar year. A period can be closed any time during the year, provided all previous periods (except period 13) have been closed.

Before a period can be closed, the system verifies that all journals in that period have been created and reported. Periods with open journals cannot be closed.

During monthly closure a check is performed on every account to verify that turnover of all postings in a period are equal to the period turnover.

Preliminary Closure

The oldest period can be preliminarily closed. In this state, only a user with special authorisation can process posting transactions in this period. A period in a preliminarily closed status may be opened or closed finally at any time.

Year End Closure

Before the actual year end closure, the system verifies that Profit and Loss postings have been processed within that year. If the balance of all P&L accounts is not zero, then the year end closure cannot be performed.

The closure of the late entry period (13) includes the year end closure. For balance sheet accounts, the brought forward amount is calculated and stored as a brought forward balance to the new year. The brought forward in P&L accounts is set to zero.

Consolidation

A consolidated balance sheet covering any entities such as divisions and/or clients are available in a number of reports.