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Integration of a custom accounting system with a third party General Ledger

Challenge

The client, an oil-bunkering company wanted to move from their old DOS based Accounting package to a more current Windows based package. They knew that most of the functionality they needed from a General Ledger point of view, was standard and would be supported by any third party tool out there. However, they wanted custom AP and AR modules to be built to fit their business practices and they wanted a General Ledger that could support custom front ends.

Solution

Calsoft did a study of the General Ledgers available and chose a General Ledger from Clarus Financials (then known as SQL financials). Calsoft studied the features of the software and devised a plan that envisaged multiple Accounting departments posting their approved and batched items into the GL through a customized “bridge” that would be written by Calsoft. The “bridge” also called the “Posting program” (PP) would take each batch of entries and generate files with debit and credit information by account in a specific format. The “Workload Manager”, a module of the Clarus software would read these files and translate them into entries in the appropriate journals

The tasks involved included:

Writing custom screens for the various Accounting departments in order to facilitate approval of items as well as batching and posting of the same. All these screens were bundled into one Accounting module.

• Items would flow into each section of the Accounting module (AP, AR, CASH, CHECK, INVNT, PURCH) from its equivalent front-end module (Voucher entry module, Invoicing module, Cash module, Check printing module, Inventory modules, and Purchasing module.
• In each section, there were screens for department supervisors to first approve the entries, batch them and also post them.

Writing the Posting Program (PP)

• The PP took the individual entries of each batch and depending on batch type, created credit and debit entries into the appropriate accounts.
• These credit and debit entries along with the account numbers were written in a specific format to a text file. One text file was generated per batch.
• The text files were then saved into a pre-specified location, their names a pre-defined sequence including the batch number and type.

Configuring the WorkLoad manager of Clarus

• This was configured to accept the format generated by the Calsoft Posting program
• The location of the file was configured
• The frequency of checking for new files to be posted was also configured to a suitable interval (90 seconds).

The following schematic shows how the data flows from the various front-end modules into the GL.

Technology

The Accounting module was a three-tier system. The presentation layer comprised Visual Basic 6.0 forms, Visual Basic components made up the business logic layer and the database used for both the module as well as the Financial package was ORACLE 8.1.5.

The solution is designed on the Microsoft Version of MarketServer. The solution exploits technologies like COM/COM+, MTS and ASP. Verisign Secure Server technology is used to ensure complete security of sensitive commercial transactions.