18.3 System menu settings

This is a Yes/No value which affects the actions which can be performed on posted financial transactions.

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  No means transactions can be altered or deleted, even after posting them. Note that if a transaction has been posted before the latest closing date, it can never be altered, not even when this value is in effect.

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  Yes means transactions can’t be altered after posting. This setting is highly preferred and considered the only correct approach to accounting as it assures visible audit trails and thereby supports fraud detection.

@@@ This item isn’t a system setting; shouldn’t it move to “Transaction approval”?? That way system settings (config) and processes are separated.

@@@ My preference is to remove the setting entirely and rely on year-end workflow. We might add an account checkpoint interface as well at some point –Chris T

It’s advisable to regularly close the books after review. This prevents user error changing reviewed numbers: after closing the books, it’s no longer possible to post in the closed period.

There are also performance benefits to closing the books, because LedgerSMB uses the fact that the figures are known-stable as a performance optimization when calculating account balances.

This is a Yes/No value which - when Yes - causes the system to install triggers to register user actions (creation/adjustments/reversals/etc…) executed on financial transactions.

@@@ Once activated, where can we see it the audit trail??

@@@ This setting should go. In 1.3 the audit trails are always enforced via triggers so this setting does nothing. –CT

This is used to store an arbitrary identification number for the business. It could be used to store a business license number or anything similar.

The unit of measurement for weights. @@@ why don’t we have a unit of measurement for distance as well??? And maybe a unit of measurement for content?

Set this field to 1 if you want to activate separation of duties or to 0 if you don’t want to enforce it. Separation of duties is explained in Section 39.1 on page 39.1.

This setting will be used to preselect an account in the listings of the three categories listed below:

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  Inventory

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  Income

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  Expense

When working with foreign currencies, the system needs two special purpose accounts. One to post the gains onto which are caused by foreign currencies increasing in value; the other to post the losses onto which are caused by foreign currencies decreasing in value.

This setting indicates which country needs to be pre-selected in country selection lists.

The language to be used when no other language has been selected. Several parts of the application require language selection, such as customer, vendor and employee entry screens.

This setting indicates which set of templates - stored in the templates/ directory - should be used. In a standard installation, the drop down lists two items:

• demo

  which contains templates based on LaTeX, which is more commonly installed but has issues dealing with accented characters

• xedemo

  which contains the same templates based on TeTeX, which handles UTF-8 input (and thus accented characters) much better than LaTeXand is broadly available, but not usually pre-installed.

Enter a list of all currencies you want to use in your company, identified by their 3-letter codes separated by a colon; i.e. “USD:EUR:CHF”. To ensure correct operation of the application, at least one currency (the company default currency) must be listed. In case of multiple currencies the first is used as the company default currency.

The fields “Company Name”, “Company Address”, “Company Phone” and “Company Fax” will be used on printed/e-mailed invoices.

This is an integer value field measuring the validity period in days for passwords set through the user’s Preferences screen. If this field is empty, passwords set through that method won’t expire.

A user will receive password expiration reminders upon logging starting a week before password expiry. When not acted upon, starting two days before expiry an hourly popup will appear requesting the user to change the password.

The application behaves this way because users with expired passwords won’t be able to log in: their password will need to be reset by a user admin.

Note that passwords set by admins for other users expire within 24 hours after setting them. This value is hard coded and can’t be overruled. This is a security measure taken to make sure as few unused accounts as possible exist: Existence of such accounts could open up security holes.

These addresses will be used to send e-mails from the system. Note that the “Default Email From” address should be configured in order to make sure e-mail doesn’t look like it’s coming from your webserver. The format to be used is ``Name'' <e-mail address> where the e-mail address should be inserted between the “” and “”.

Some elements in the screens may present a drop down. However, drop downs are relatively unwieldy to work with when used to present a large number of values to choose from.

This configuration option sets an upper limit on the number of records to be presented as drop down. When the number is exceeded, no drop down is used. Instead, a multi-step selection procedure will be used.

Many items in the system have sequence numbers: invoices, parts, etc. These sequence numbers can be just a number (i.e. 1 or 37), but they can also be prefixed numbers, e.g. INV0001 for invoices and EMP001 for employees. The numbers shown in the input boxes will be used to generate the next number in the numbering sequence.

The prefix to use when printing checks. There’s no check sequence number. That sequence number is requested from the check printing interface, because checks can be created outside the application as well, meaning the numbers can get out of sync.