A Report on Accounting Application Anne Sentiono, Chaitanya Komireddy, MaryAnne Midy School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Oregon State University The main objective of this project is to develop an accounting application for a big organization like a school or a company. Our accounting application includes account details of the sales, purchase, wages, and investments. It is a multidimensional accounting model which gives information about accounts from different perspectives like project, departments, and activities. Our project aims at generating reports, PDF files, of the various accounts of the company. Section 2 describes the process of the whole project. Section 3 is about the interesting things encountered during the project. Section 4 shows the ER diagram. Section 5 provides the most interesting screenshots of the project. Our main objective for this project was to make operational an accounting database schema. As one of our initial homework was to implement a sales model for a company, we acquired a good understanding of the requirements and the main tables expected for the accounting system. We took the best sales schema designed by one of our teammates and made some changes like adding new tables and entities, and changing relationships, with the guidance of our professor. We followed the same procedure for the purchases. Next, we took these two well-designed schemas of sales and purchase and merged them into a complete accounting model. During the entire project we decided to use as example a school organization like OSU, even if the end product is for all type of companies. After having read some accounting papers and tutorials provided by our professor and met several times different accountants, we decided that our merging table would be the one that represents the transaction: acc_transaction. Later on, in order to have a powerful schema, we used inheritance relationships between the merging table and the core tables from Sales and Purchase. In addition, we noticed that several tables like wages and investment were missing depending on specific user stories. Therefore, we decided to have both tables inheriting from the parent table acc_transaction. Once we had asked specific questions to accountants, we noticed that few tables like project, department and activities were needed from the multidimensional accounting model point of view. Because it was part of our initial user requirements, we added these tables to our schema. With this representation, we were able to retrieve information for a specific project, its department and its activities. After the completion of our work on the database model, we run scripts to generate and create PDF forms. Through this entire project we learned a lot about accounting. We realized that it is a difficult area and it requires accuracy in the words used to describe the different operations made by accountants. Our daily meetings, the work, knowledge, and opinion we shared were very helpful. This was a continuous way to improve our work and use the Extreme Programming methods.
Accounting Project
1/2
However, we encountered several problems during the past ten weeks. One of them was to understand accounting and provide a system according to accountants’ expectations. Another one we had was with the inheritance relationships. Even though it is very useful, we had to deal with the generation of forms and also the visualization of the ER diagram using Visio. Indeed, because the primary keys of the child tables were not defined within the table themselves, it didn’t always work. Finally at the end of project we are proud to have a system that works. With our model we can link every single activity that takes place in the accounting department of a company to each other according to our requirements.
Accounting Project
2/2
