business accounts software uk from Whitegate Computing Ltd UK including exchequer enterprise accounting software and sage line 100 financial account solution for easy accounts management

Assets

The resources possessed by a firm.


Activity based management/activity based costing

Activity-based costing (ABC), first introduced 15 years ago, provides a means of accurately assigning support or 'soft' costs to product manufacture that includes the administrative resources that a job actually consumes, not just labour, machinery, and materials. The ABC approach calls for mapping all of a company's workflows and processes so that each activity that contributes to costs is identified and traced through the system. Analysis of activity leads to an Activity Based Management (ABM) business model from which management can make decisions to improve the effectiveness of the organisation.


Application Service Provision

Application service provision is where a company will manage and distribute software over networks from a central location. As a client you effectively rent software that is installed and upgraded for you automatically. In the field of accounting and financial software, application service provision could allow for training, technology transfer and full technical and system support together the hosting of an accounting solution and software support, all provided as part of the packaged service fee.


Average Cost

With each receipt of goods, the average cost of goods held in stock is recalculated and any issue of stock is then made at that price.

Balanced scorecard

Now used by an estimated 60 percent of Fortune 1000 companies, balanced scorecards are strategic measurement systems that provide an overview of financial, customer, operational and innovation issues. With more systems, companies can automate the balanced scorecard approach to track and improve customer and channel profitability, revenue/expense ratios, organisational expertise, quality, employee output, timeliness and responsiveness, product and service mix, and many more operational attributes.


Balance sheet

A statement listing all the remaining balances in the books, after the profit and loss accounts have been completed, arranged according to whether they are asset, liability or capital balances. It gives a snapshot of the health of a business at any point in time.


Budgeting, planning & forecasting

Businesses are making big changes in their budget planning and forecasting processes. Once carried out by a financial director and a few accountants, budget planning is becoming more of a company-wide effort thanks to the latest software, with a greater number of managers and employees contributing to the process. Many companies are using technology to combine the traditional bottom-up approach to budget preparation, in which department heads submit budget requests that are rolled up into a corporate budget, with a top-down approach in which budgets are prepared in line with strategic objectives outlined by top management. And while annual budgets were once as unchanging as a statue, more companies now view budgets as living documents that are revised on an ongoing basis throughout the year.

Capital

Resources possessed by a firm that are supplied by the owners of a business.


Cashflow Statement

A financial statement concerned with examining the reasons underlying the rise and fall in cash funds over a period.


Client/Server

A client-server architecture is a general mechanism for handling a shared resource that several programs may want to access simultaneously. The client-server architecture has several advantages, many of them resulting from the ability to run the server and the clients on separate machines. E.g. A client-server architectured system can be very robust: since the server runs in its own address space, it can protect itself against poorly written clients. Thus, if a client has a bug, it will crash alone, the server and the other clients still running as if nothing has happened. It also offers greater speed and performance as the processing is performed mainly on the server which reduces the amount of data traffic over the network.


Commitment accounting

Commitment accounting refers to the commitment you make to pay for something ordered but not yet paid for. A useful tool to improve budgetary control, commitment accounting has historically been a paper based record system,. New accounting solutions, however, can automate this process, allowing companies to instantly get a snapshot of their financial commitments and cash position.


COM

COM (Component Object Model) is in use on well over 200 million systems worldwide and is the foundation for most Microsoft applications and development languages. Virtually all-modern day development languages are COM compliant. COM can be used for both integration and customisation of Enterprise.


Control Account

A control account is an account in the general ledger in which a record is kept of the total value of a number of similar but individual items. Control accounts are used chiefly for debtors and creditors. They should agree with the total of the individual balances and act as a check to ensure that all transactions have been recorded correctly in the individual ledger accounts. It can also be described as a type of trial balance for each ledger to highlight errors in an area of the overall trial balance such as in the sales ledger or purchases ledger.


Credit management

It is estimated that small businesses are owed £17bn from debtors at any one time - £6.8 billion of that paid late - while other research has indicated that approximately 10,000 UK businesses fail each year as a consequence of late payment. Keeping tabs on sales, invoices and money received is therefore crucial. The latest credit management systems allow for centralised control - enabling companies to forecast cash flow and chase debts without launching separate applications or switching between different screens.


Creditor

A person or organisation to whom money is owed for goods or services.

Debtor

A person who owes the firm money.


Depreciation

Is the measure of the wearing out, consumption or other loss of value of fixed asset whether arising from use, effluxion of time or obsolescence through technology or market changes.


Double-entry

This is the two fold effect of each transaction by which each transaction is entered twice, one to show the effect upon one item and a second entry to show effect of the other item.


DLL

For those developers who prefer to work with DLLs (Dynamic Link Libraries), or do not have the ability to use COM, the Exchequer.NET SDK comes with a Toolkit DLL, which again provides an extremely high level of integration and functionality to be accessed by external applications.

E-business/e-commerce

E-commerce and e-business can be broadly defined to include any kind of transaction that is made using digital technology, including open networks (the internet), closed networks such as electronic data interchange (EDI), and debit and credit cards. Transactions are not limited to purchases of goods and services, but move along a spectrum beginning with information gathering and exchange, progressing to negotiation and decision to purchase, finally to completion of transaction and after sales support. In the field of accounting software, e-commerce friendly systems can lower procurement costs, reduce processing errors, reduce inventory costs, reduce time to market and extend business reach.


Electronic banking/BACS

Modern electronic and online banking systems can provide a service to businesses where debits and credits of accounts are transparent, doing away with the needless secondary entry of invoices and payments. Some allow businesses to post payments directly into their online banking software and download online statements for bank reconciliation purposes. BACS software solutions enable validation of bank account details to help automate payroll systems.


E-procurement

E-procurement software makes it possible to automate buying and selling. Companies participating should expect to be able to control parts inventories more effectively, reduce purchasing agent overhead, and improve manufacturing cycles. E-procurement is expected to be integrated with the trend toward computerised supply chain management.


Exchequer .NET SDK

The Exchequer .NET SDK [Software Developers Kit] capitalises on Microsoft's COM technology and .NET initiative to provide an industry standard development platform for integration, customisation, interrogation and reporting. The SDK enables developers, software partners and authorised resellers to tailor Enterprise to your requirement using industry standard languages and upgrade-resistant technology.

Field service management

Traditional field service management is an ad hoc arrangement where technicians in the field have paperwork thrown at them. These people, who are in high demand, receive their daily schedules on paper. There are no maps or time frames, and no details about what is involved in a particular customer's maintenance contract. Through software automation, however, technicians can remain in contact with their home base. They can access the information in the customer's service agreement, inspect spare parts availability and even determine if there is a fellow technician close by that may have a needed replacement part. Better yet, customers can log into a vendor's system and find out where the technician is.


FIFO 

First In First Out – The first goods received are deemed to be the first goods issued.


Financial consolidation

Financial consolidation can be a slow and error prone process that drains organisational resources and delays vital decisions. The problems are formidable - consolidating financial data from diverse locations and across multiple general ledgers, performing multi-currency conversions, untangling outmoded spreadsheet based data collection processes, incorporating changes from reorganisations, mergers, and acquisitions. Financial consolidation solutions can meet this challenge by streamlining data collection and integration from multiple sources, making the monthly close faster and more efficient while turning disparate data into useful, business critical information.


Fixed assets/asset management

A coherent strategy for asset management will improve a company's competitiveness and shareholder value. Asset management solutions can enable businesses to maximise the profitability of assets in their four distinct lifecycle phases: buying, tracking, managing and selling. As a result, assets perform for longer periods of time, reducing requirements to procure new capital assets and increasing the total profitability of existing assets.


FRS

Financial Reporting Standard.

Gantt Chart

Gantt charts are a project planning tool that can be used to represent the timing of tasks required to complete a project. In a Gantt chart, each task takes up one row. Dates run along the top in increments of days, weeks or months, depending on the total length of the project. The expected time for each task is represented by a horizontal bar whose left end marks the expected beginning of the task and whose right end marks the expected completion date. Tasks may run sequentially, in parallel or overlapping


Gross Profit

This is the excess of sales over the cost of goods sold in the period.

Inventory/stock control

In stock control the idea is to have just enough around to feed. Modern inventory and stock control systems mean inventory records are automatically updated when goods are received and sold. Reports show the actual stock holdings and warnings for under and overstocked lines. In addition, some packages allow turnover and profit analysis by product so that 'hot items' are signalled for reordering and unprofitable lines can be evaluated for further action.

Liabilities

The indebtedness of a firm for resources that are provided by someone other than the owner.


LIFO 

Last In First Out – The last goods received are deemed to be the first goods issued.

Margin

Is the profit when expressed as a fraction, or percentage, of the selling price


Mark-Up

Is the profit when expressed as a fraction, or percentage, of the cost price


Multi-company

Multi-company systems should allow easy access of multiple companies within one program. This means that you can easily switch from one company database to another in just a few keystrokes - each containing their own set of customers, inventory, documents, locations, and so on.


Multi-currency/euro-compliance

Multi-currency and euro-compliance functionality enables invoices to be sent and received in the currency of your choice. Invoices of one currency can be paid in a different currency and exchange rates can be entered for each currency. Packages can allow debtors and creditors to be revalued when rates change and a journal generated. Packages can also allow the general ledger to shows revenue and expenses converted from foreign currency to domestic.


Multi dimensional analysis

The objective of multi-dimensional analysis is for end users to gain insight into the meaning contained in databases. The multi-dimensional approach eases navigating the database, screening for a particular subset of data, asking for the data in a particular orientation and defining analytical calculations. Furthermore, because the data is physically stored in a multi-dimensional structure, the speed of these operations is many times faster and more consistent than is possible in other database structures. In accounting and financial software, multi dimensional analysis can allow automatic handling of inter company postings and currency revaluations, with an unlimited number of reporting structures including financial, non-financial and statistical data.

Net Profit

What remains after all other costs used up in a period have been deducted from the gross profit.


Nominal Ledger

Also known as a General Ledger, this is a ledger/book which contains all accounts except those that are contained in the Sales and Purchases Ledgers and the Cash book. These ledgers all contain accounts and part of double entry.

ODBC
Open Data Base Connectivity


OLE
Object Linking and Embedment

Payroll

Good payroll software does more than just calculate wages and print payslips. It enables you to gather information on your employment costs and to keep track of individual employees. Packages can offer a range of extra modules that can be bought as add-ons. These will give you the option of expanding the capability of you payroll software to cover specific tasks, such as automatic bonus calculations and BACS transfers. Additional features and functionality from certain packages on the market include full calculation of SSP, SMP, National Insurance and pensions.


Project Costing

Project Costing is both a time billing and a job costing application that addresses the needs of companies tracking the progress of projects or jobs. Project costing allows the user to define the structure of the project and to make decisions about what type of project it is, how the project levels will accrue income and costs, and how billing will be handled.

Remote Access

This is the ability of an application user to access the application from alternative locations such as from a home PC. A user can dial-in to the server in the office and have access to the system as if they were physically at their desk in the office.


Report generation

Reporting tools generate a collection of modifiable reports that allow you easy access to all your underlying transactions. The software will incorporate graphical tools that report on cash flow, for instance, or on monies yet due and owed. Certain packages will automatically distribute appropriate reports by email as a spreadsheet or can publish HTML reports to a designated area on a corporate intranet.


ROI

Return On Investment

SORP

Statement of Recommended Practice


SQL

Structured Query Language


SSAP

Statement of Standard Accounting Practice


Suspense Account

If a Trial Balance does not agree, to make it agree the difference between the two sides is inserted into a Suspense Account. This is just temporary and all discrepancies should be found before the final accounts are prepared, often known as ‘clearing down the suspense account’.

Taxation

Taxation systems cover a variety of areas from personal and partnership tax issues through to corporate tax. Most systems will allow on screen completion of the tax return to ensure accuracy, along with auto-population of key data fields to reduce the need to re-key data. 'What you see is what you get' functionality ensures that the printed tax return is correct before sending it to print.


Time recording

Time recording systems allow the user to record chargeable time, disbursements and other expenses to allow efficient billing. At the same time, you can identify ways of improving recoverability and margins. Certain packages allow for powerful reporting facilities which enable you to extract the reports you want from the client, staff databases, the work-in-progress, the fees, the purchase and the nominal ledgers.


Trading, Profit & Loss Account

This measures the excess of revenue over the cost of goods sole in period as well as all of the other costs used in a period which are known as overheads.


Treasury management/cash management

Managing cash is a crucial activity for any business, and the latest treasury and cash management software offers advanced functionality that lets companies monitor and forecast their cash position at any time and in multiple currencies. With immediate access to all their cash transactions, companies can make proactive business decisions to manage their cash flow more effectively. 


Trial Balance

This is a test to see if the totals of the debits and the credits in all the accounts are equal i.e. to see if the two sides of the books ‘balance’.

Unified ledger

A unified ledger system is designed to allow finance and accounts departments to track, manage and report on a broad spectrum of financial parameters - from expense and employee ledgers through to building and branch accounting ledgers. The software is designed to minimise manual re-keying of data through its unified ledger architecture, with some packages offering real time reporting where users can view business data in a wide range of formats.

Workflow/document management

Workflow and document management systems can greatly reduce the paperwork and administrative costs of running a business. They can also improve business performance by reducing the time and cost of processing information. Modern workflow and document management systems ensure that established policies, procedures and timeliness are observed through tracking the status of a workflow, spotting bottlenecks, and reporting on average completion times.
 

Work-In-Progress

Goods only part completed at the beginning and end of an accounting period. The value of work-in-progress at the beginning of a period is added to the total production cost for the period and the closing work-in-progress is deducted.