Freeside:Documentation:Accounting

Accounting Features

FreeSide is an excellent billing system, and with a little SQL knowledge, just about any feed can be created to build journals in quickbooks, etc. Here are a few of the FreeSide features that make accounting types happy.

• Full Activity History (Audit Trail)
• Revenue recognition to the second (Although you probably DON'T want to do this)
• Ability to track revenue in multiple ways
  1. True Accrual Recognize/Defer w/ Bad Debt Allowance
  2. True Cash Based
  3. Hybrid - Accrue/Defer revenue once cash is recieved
• Full Accounts Recievable w/ aging reports
• Lazy Pay Support
• Organize by Business Unit and Track Cash Independently

Accounting Tables and Fields

part_pkg 

Packages, generally referred to as a sku. For FreeSide this is a collection of services, at a price for a period, billed using a pricing plan.

cust_main 

Customer Record

cust_pkg  

Customer Purchased Skus

cust_bill 

Customer Invoice

cust_bill_pkg 

Customer Invoice Line Items - The cust_bill_pkg record has the invoice start and end date for this item. This allows you to recognize the line item to the second (Although I find month to be more convenient)

cust_pay  

Customer Payment - This record contains enough information (at least on cybersource)to be able to reconcile with your payment processor.

cust_bill_pay 

Links the payment to the invoice - This doesn not link the payment to the line item. You will have to define your business rules for how you want the accounting for each line item.

cust_credit 

Credit applied to a customer. Generally this is recorded as a sales discount. The notable exception is the unused service credit. It looks alot like cash - even more so in a true accrual system.

cust_credit_bill 

Credit application to an invoice. See the caveat above for payment applications.

Generally using these tables, you can get most everything required to create daily journals.

Daily Journals vs. Raw Data

Since the beginning of time, accounting types have argued over the amount of data to keep in an operational system and how much detail to transfer to the accounting system. All I can say is that reconciling two systems is very difficult and daily summaries make it easier. Your milage may vary.