Could we have Financial Statements show reports for individual business units as well? This is especially useful for businesses with multiple locations like stores. All the tools we need are already present in ERPNext. Cost Centers already can be used to track financials in different Business Units/Locations but then it is only available as a top-level filter in the Financial Analytics report
It would be really great to have Cost Centers show up as additional columns in the Financial Statements (Yearly). Of course the user would have the option to select which Cost Centers should be added to the reports just like we can pick columns in the report builder. This way, businesses with multiple locations can immediately view and compare the performance of each outlet at a single glance (just like you have in Quickbooks using the Location/Classes feature)
The best part about all this is that it seems to me like something that shouldn’t be too difficult to achieve considering that all the underlying information is already within the system. This will also satisfy the need of ‘some’ of those who are requesting for aggregated financial statements across Companies
Could this feature be added to the Financial Reports?
I think you Need to use Financial Analytics Report for achive what you want. There is PL or BS Named field which will genrate report based on Cost center. And also if you want do business for multiple location you should use cost center for each location while doing data enry.
But what happens when you have multiple cost centers within a business unit? The way some other ERPs handle this is with Profit Centers and Segments. Perhaps, as a custom solution, @Wale, you should create a custom field in your cost center called segment with which you can group your cost centers. Creating a report on the basis of the Segment would then give you all the accounts by segment.
Yes, but what ties all the cost centers in one business unit together? How can I report for a business unit without having to manually specify a long list of cost centers?
Thanks a lot for your feedback but if you carefully read my original post, you’ll notice that I already know about the Financial Analytics report but it doesn’t quite cover the requirement. I am however working on a report based on the existing FA report which will render the information as required
@Chude_Osiegbu thanks for the suggestion. The current tree structure of the Cost Centers is sufficient for any grouping needs
I have small problem with the grouping though. Today in Frappe/ERPNext, a cost center can only belong to one tree. It means that the organisational structure can only be represented in one way in reporting. In practice though, multiple groups containing different combinations of cost centers should be able to be maintained so that reporting can be done in flexible ways. Eg, one group for management accounting analysis, another for line of business analysis (assuming the business segment approach on cost center is not used) etc.
I’ve been working on a concept for flexible groups which I’ll share shortly.