We developed a framework that closes the gap between OpenERP's account_payment module and its account module. It adds business intelligence to bank import parsers and bank export generators. Making parsers and generators has never been so easy!
Rationale
Banking is an important part of doing business. It should 'just work'. OpenERP has tons of functionality, but a unified way of doing banking was absent. Until now.
What you get
- A modular framework for developing new bank interfaces. All business logic and wizards are already written. You just need to add the interface to the bank itself.
- A working reference implementation of both an import interface and an export interface to most Dutch banks (Multlbank/ClieOp3).
- A sound import mechanism: reloading of the same transactions from different files is recognized and handled and files with transactions originating from different owner bank account numbers is handled as well.
- Automated importing of invoices and payments into bank statements for reconciliation.
- Automated creation of banks and bank accounts when receiving payments from unknown sources. When these payments include enough information to match invoices, partners are coupled right away.
- A moment of validation. After all, no automated process is perfect. You are responsible, you decide if the imports are correct. If not, you can correct them by hand.
- A generic programming interface to banking transactions
- The ability to develop your banking interfaces in separate banking related modules.
- The ability to extract the correctly represented local accounts from IBAN accounts with a single statement.
- Tools to parse fixed undelimited records
- A hook to include online local -> IBAN/BIC conversion services and a working example of such a hook for Dutch national bank accounts.
- Spare time
What changes
- Bank Statement is no longer tied to Account Period. Instead, Bank Statement Lines are tied to Account Period. This prevents some very sneaky and still unsolved errors when encoding real life bank statements into OpenERP's bank statements.
- Payments get an extra state 'Sent' to reflect sending payment orders through the interface.
- Import mechanics are configured beforehand on a per bank account per journal basis.
Why we did it
- Bank Statement in OpenERP's account module have puzzled a lot of people. Some have found out they can't do without, some dropped it on first site. Fact is that there is no clear match between the Bank Statement in real life and a Bank Statement in OpenERP. This module changes that. A Bank Statement is now a real life container for a list of bank transactions. No mistakes.
- Banks accounts have different peculiarities over the various countries. It is common practice for companies to have bank accounts in different countries. Up until now, the various national banking interfaces went into the various l10n_xxx modules. That makes it difficult to say the least to use bank accounts from different countries in parallel. This modules paves the way to convert them to a generic banking scheme and independent of the l10n_xxx modules.
- Copy and paste practice for 'just getting an import parser' does not add to stability and reliability. This module lends developers a hand while maintaining stability.
- Payments out and payments in were two separate domains in OpenERP. That does not reflect real life banking. This module combines the two and enhances support of the users process.
- When receiving large amounts of payments, people had to import invoices by hand to match the received amounts of money. This module automates that process as much as possible, creating obvious matches straight on and leaving the operator only the remaining work.
- In face of the Single European Payment Area, which touches 26 countries, including some far beyond Europe, there is some progress to be made in OpenERP as well. This module lays the foundation for this, including the ability to dynamically convert IBAN accounts to local accounts on a view basis.
Where to find it
The framework itself and the two working example implementations can be found in our download section.
For remarks and contributions, feel free to contact us.
