What Is an 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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activities for Project Accounting and Billing and Revenue Management
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user analyses for Strategic Ledger
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transactions for General Ledger, Project Accounting, Billing and Revenue Management, and Strategic Ledger
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assets for Asset Management
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leases for Lease Management
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vendors for Accounts Payable, Invoice Matching, Purchase Order
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customers for Accounts Receivable, Order Entry, Billing, Warehouse
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cash codes for Cash Management
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items for Inventory Control, Purchase Order, Order Entry, Warehouse, Production 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 from a subsystem 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 than 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.
