Project Accounting process flow

Project Accounting can be broken down into six main processes: setup, budgeting, processing transactions, processing allocations, maintenance, and analysis and reporting. This section provides an overview of each of these main processes, and the relationships between them.

Setup

Before using Project Accounting, you must set up these entities to define your activity structure:

  • Activity groups

  • Activities

  • Account categories

Additional setup procedures are optional, including:

  • Resources

  • Burdens

  • Attributes

This section also includes a chapter that shows the procedures you will use to maintain the activity structure you set up. For example, you want to move activities or add levels to your activity structure after initial setup.

Budgeting

You can define budgets in Project Accounting to monitor the resources available for a particular purpose. You can define budgets at the activity group or activity level. This chapter also presents several optional methods that you can use to define budgets, including creating computed budgets which are based on calculations you define.

Transaction processing

You will use Project Accounting to perform a variety of transaction processing. In addition to processing journal entries that you create directly in Project Accounting, you can interface transactions from other Lawson and non-Lawson application. You can also perform special processing such as tracking commitments, processing encumbrances, capitalizing assets, and closing a period.

Allocating costs and revenues

Project Accounting includes allocation capabilities that you can use to allocate costs, revenues, and statistics to activities. Several methods are available for performing allocations. You can base allocations on:

  • a fixed percentage

  • a factor

  • a combination of percentages and factors

  • a compute statement

  • a list

Accessing data

Accessing data that you have collected is a vital part of using Project Accounting to make important business decisions. To access data, you can perform online analysis, run standard reports, create user-defined transaction reports, and report on data in the activity data mart.