Attribute
An attribute is a field that holds information you can use to group records for reporting, inquiry, and processing. Specifically, attributes hold information about:
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Accounting units or accounts for General Ledger, Inventory Control, Purchase Order
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Assets for Asset Management
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Activities for Project Accounting, Billing and Revenue Management
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User analyses for Strategic Ledger
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Transactions for General Ledger, Project Accounting, Strategic Ledger, and Multi-Book Ledger
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Leases for Lease Management
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Items for Inventory Control, Purchase Order, Order Entry, Warehouse, Production Order
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Customers for Accounts Receivable, Order Entry, Billing, Warehouse
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Vendors for Accounts Payable, Invoice Matching, Purchase Order
Two types of attributes
With Attribute Matrix you can view your organization's data in a variety of ways, providing more information and more flexibility in reporting. You can use attributes in two ways:
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Group accounting units or accounts based on common characteristics, such as all stores in a specific region or of a specific size. There is a Lawson-defined attribute for each field on Accounting Units-Accounts (GL20.1) and Chart of Accounts (GL00.1). You can also create user-defined attributes to track other characteristics that are important to you. These Lawson-defined and user-defined attributes are the focus of this chapter.
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Store additional information in a transaction, such as attaching an invoice vendor number and invoice batch number to an invoice distribution journal entry. Attributes attached to a transaction are called transaction attributes and are treated differently from other attributes. Transaction attribute
Example: Using attributes with accounting units
ABC Company is a retail organization that wants to track profitability by region, but its General Ledger company structure is set up by store type, not location. They defined a Region attribute that lets them group stores by location for reporting purposes. Values for the Region attribute are Northwest and Central.
