General Ledger
maintains the chart of accounts and stores company transactions including assets, liabilities, equity, revenues, and expenses. As the core of an accounting system, the GL provides a complete record of financial transactions over the life of a company.
Accounts Payable
Accounts Payable are liabilities for the purchase of goods and services to a creditor, provided in advance of payment. This AP module manages a fully featured electronic approval and utilizes comprehensive paperless invoicing, creating a robust and automated workflow.
Accounts Receivable
Accounts Receivable are assets on outstanding credit for the sale of goods or services, as well as the collection of those funds. With substantial yet streamlined invoice entry, this AR module operates with extensive reporting and credit invoicing, congruent with other applications.
Balance Sheet
The Balance Sheet summarizes an entity's assets, liabilities, and equity at a point in time. Also known as an income statement, the balance sheet is used by lenders, investors, and creditors to estimate the liquidity of a business.
Bank Book
Cash Management, or Bank Book, is the collection of cash account transactions for the reconciliation of balances. Bank book uses a three-way reconciliation to provide an accurate view of cash on hand. Digital files of canceled items from the bank are automatically reconciled with account balances in the general ledger.
Bank Reconciliation
Bank reconciliation is the process of matching balances in a cash account to the corresponding information in a bank statement. In the past, the comparison was done manually. Today, companies use a digital file provided by their bank to perform automatic reconciliation in their accounting system.
Budgeting
A budget is, once prepared, a quantifiable strategy for delegating future financial activities. The summarization of these estimates is called an income statement and balance sheet.
Cash Flow Statement
One of three basic financial reports that indicate the financial condition of a business, the cash flow statement shows how changes in balance sheet accounts and income affect cash. It breaks the analysis down to operating, investing, and financing activities. Reviewing the Cash Flow Statement, along with the Balance Sheet and P&L, provides basic insight into the health of a business.
Consolidations
Consolidation is the combination, or roll up, of multiple entities into a single entity for reporting purposes. In accounting, consolidated reporting presents the parent company and its subsidiaries as one in order to measure the financial status of the entire organization.
Dimensional Accounting
Dimensions allows the creation of additional values on the fly without having to create corresponding General Ledger accounts. Dimensional accounting delivers real-time visibility into a company's performance using dashboards and financial reports.
Financial Reporting
Financial reports such as balance sheets, income statements, and cash flow statements, reflect the financial status of an organization. Reports are run for a specific date range and generated based on the information stored in a company's financial management software.
Access Groups
The Access Group field determines whether a user has security privileges for a particular record. In SBS, all users have access to a record when the Access Group field is blank. When an Access Group is assigned to a record, the record can be seen and used only by users who have the security privileges for that Access Group. If a user doesn't have privileges for a record, the record will not be visible to them. It isn't displayed in queries or searches, can't be viewed and edited in entries, and won't be printed on reports.
Inter-Company Transfers
Intercompany accounting, a.k.a reconciliations, is the process of balancing the accounts between two entities of the same parent company to bring the balances to zero in the general ledger. The entities may be in different locations and have different products or services.
Multi-Entity Accounting
Multiple entity accounting, a.k.a. multi-company accounting, processes the expenses and revenue of individual companies that are owned by a parent company. Financial statements for each company are consolidated, or rolled up, to produce a single financial report for the ogranization. Multi-entity accounting software provides seamless financial and statistical reporting by cost center, department, location, region, division, or any business unit that the user defines. Enterprise level multi-entity accounting systems allow an unlimited number of users to access the software simultaneously.
Paperless Office
The term Paperless Office refers to using digital or electronic files instead of paper documents. Eliminating paper reduces company expenses for printing, filing, and storing documents. Accounting systems that have integrated paperless office functionality let users drill-down to invoice images and support documents stored in the system.
Profit and Loss Statement
Also known as a P&L, this statement reports the company revenues, expenses, and gains and losses which occurred during a specific period of time.
Accounting Software Related Terms and Defintions
API
Application Programming Interface (API) describes the routines, protocols, and tools that software applications use to communicate with each other. The API is the messenger that delivers a request from SBS software to your proprietary invoicing software and returns the requested data back to SBS. The function of an API is to act as a window between individual software programs allowing them to interact without requiring either developer to share their entire code. Common types of Web APIs are Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), Remote Procedure Call (RPC), and Representational State Transfer (REST).
Cloud hosting and SaaS
Cloud hosting lets users store and access their software applications via the Internet rather than from an on-premise server or individual computer hard drive. SBS' cloud accounting software is hosted on a secure, private server that allows customers to run their applications and access data from anywhere with an Internet connection. This approach is also known as providing Software as a Service (SaaS) because it eliminates the need for on-premise servers, hardware support, and on-site backups.
