Rules

Overview

You can define a rule for every type of business event that has accounting impact in creating journal entries or for every type of transformation requirement in generating any business document. Examples of business events are order of goods, receipts of goods, and payments to suppliers. Examples of transformation requirements are data harmonization for master data business documents and process integration for intercompany transactions.

A rule contains conditions, receiver information and a rule script. If the conditions are met, a corresponding rule script is used to generate output business documents. For accounting framework integration, a rule also contains output settings.

Rule condition

The rule conditions contain these details:

• Business document - Here you specify the particular master data or transactional document the rule applies to. For accounting framework integration, you specify only the input transactional business document as the output always refers to SourceSystemJournalEntry. For a flexible output integration, both the input and output business document must be defined.
• Document references - Given the flow of business events that occur for an industry and organization, business documents that emanate from these events will naturally link with one another. In order to correctly create an output, some information from another business document is needed.

  For example, assuming that a ReceiveDelivery document contains only the quantity of goods received and not the price. In order to correctly compute for the amount of the transaction, the unit price from the related purchase order document must be obtained. In this case, PurchaseOrder is referenced by ReceiveDelivery. In IGFC, you could define this relationship thru the document references. It allows you to identify the document and the specific attribute that is used as reference for a given rule.

  Given above example, IGFC suspends processing of the ReceiveDelivery document without the PurchaseOrder document. A warning message is displayed pending the receipt of the document reference. Once received, an automatic reprocessing feature is triggered in IGFC.

  See Error messaging in IGFC.

• Sender entity - Here you specify the source entity of the input business document.

Receiver information

The receiver information contains the entity. You must specify the destination entity of the output business document.

For accounting framework integration, the receiver information contains these additional details:

• Receiver Accounting Book. Here you specify the destination accounting book of the output SourceSystemJournalEntry business document.
• Location. Specify the location value that is indicated in the output SourceSystemJournalEntry business document.

For flexible output integration, a rule contains these additional output document definitions:

• Business document. Here you specify the particular master data or transactional document that will be generated. Output document verb and action codes must also be defined.
• Output verb and action code. The default verb is Process and action code is Add. You can change this to specify an action code of Change for the Process verb, or use a Sync verb and specify an action code of either Add or Replace.
• Splitting field. Generate multiple business documents out of a single input master data or transactional document. When this field is defined, the rule generates multiple XML instances by splitting the output document based on the unique values of the split attribute field that you specify.

Rule mapping/rule script

This component creates the values for the output business document. Rule mapping is a user interface that facilitates the mapping of the output document attribute to a source value. You can assign a value to each attribute by selecting from a drop down list. A text-mode rule script facility is also provided.

For accounting framework integration, it is responsible for creating journal entry header and lines of the output SourceSystemJournalEntry business document. Specifically, these are the journal line values that are populated:

• All amount and currency attributes
• Ledger account number
• Dimensions
• Journal line user fields

In writing rule scripts, you need to use a scripting language proprietary to IGFC.

See IGFC scripting language guide.

Output settings

For accounting framework integration, the output settings are an additional rule configuration that allow you to specify whether the journals that are to be created are in detailed or summarized form. These are referred to as posting methods.

By default, journals are created using the detailed posting method.

When summarized posting method is selected, you can define the parameters by which to group journal lines. The primary and required summarization parameter is the account number. You can specify one or more account numbers or a range of account numbers. Also, all account numbers can be used as a summarization parameter.

Optionally, attributes of the journal line can be included as additional summarization parameters. This includes the attributes of the SourceSystemJournalEntry business document that are mapped in IGFC, except these:

• Amount and currency attributes, except memo amount
• Ledger account attributes
• Accounting chart reference attributes
• Dimension code attributes

Using the summarization parameters, multiple journal entry lines are aggregated into a single journal entry line to generate the output journal, with the amounts totaled to arrive at their net balance.

This is the order by which IGFC summarizes journals:

• Ledger account number
• Amount currencies
• Other attributes defined as additional parameter

This facility is found within the rules setup page. Alternatively, output settings are also found within the rule script page.