In multi-company environment, there are often the need of having a consolidated reports. Those reports are the same as the standard ones but grouped for a set of companies. The inter-company transactions should be excluded.
Proposal
We could re-use the same concept as the Account Type group Account. It will be a Meta-Account Type that groups a list of Account Type of different companies.
The reports are like “Balance Sheet” and “Income Statement” using a context which also contains a selection of companies. This selection will be used to select the types to be summed and to filter out the inter-company transactions (by overriding Line.query_get).
To identify the inter-company Moves, a new field will be added on the Move that references another company. This field will always be editable to correct the consolidate reports (just like the analytic).
The field could be filled automatically when posting an invoice if the party is another company.
I’m wondering if we should not use a checkbox on the invoice to give some flexibility. This checkbox could be automatically filled when a party is selected. But it could still be changed after.
But maybe it is too much as far as we can edit the inter-company field on the move at any time.
No it is a move in a company accounting that is related to an operation with another company managed by the system.
So such move should not be taken into account when doing a consolidate report otherwise numbers are artificially increased.
But this is not a single move, but two moves (one for each company).
In case we are showing individual reports such move should be shown on both company reports.
Right?
Does it make sense to allow the user to include them? I will prefer to have an option so the user may decide to include or exclude them.
For example, say in company A we create a customer invoice to company B. We may want that both Expense and Receivable move lines have the “consolidation” field filled in but not the tax move line.
I’m wondering if this new module should have a also a template like we have for the standard chart of accounts (but allowing more than a single values)
This will be usefull for example in case the group wants to consolidate the values of several companies in the same country.
In case of mixin several countries, the user will have a base type (for the most common chart) and then just add the values of the missing companies.
Those are very similar to the type accounts and the mapping can be added easly.
I think it’s usefull to include this as part of the templates and add a wizard to setup the consolidated reports for all companies types having a know type structure (only for same country), instead of creating everything manually.
As there will still be need to manually select the companies and the account types, I do not see any real benefit in having pre-created template. I see that just as an extra maintenance burden for a very small benefit.
Indeed the account types can be automatically selected based on the template that created them.
For the companies is just a mather of having a many2many to pick them.
It simplifies the tasks when there are several companies from the same country.