FINANCIAL SUMMARIES
The Finance module was designed to help users connect their technnical data to their financial systems. It is not intended to support accounting practices or to act as an accounting system. It's main usefulness will be to help extract useful financial information from your accounting systems and associate it with business objects in PPDM.
The PPDM Data model does not attempt to capture accounting information, accounting processes or to satisfy the business needs of accountants. It simply provides a connector between PPDM and an accounting system, and provides a place into which some costs can be stored so that they can be easily queried in conjunction with business information. In this sense, the FINANCE module provides a very important component of building useful Business Intelligence.
Some basic information, such as the cost center identifier, budget and actual amounts, and breakdowns can be captured.
Using this module
Use FINANCE to track your cost centers, and FIN_COMPONENT to tie the cost center to all the land rights or other business objects that they are paying for.
The FIN_COST_SUMMARY table may be useful to you if you want to track how a cost center number is broken down - you can track what percent of a cost is allocted to a particular object (you'll see a link to the proper row in FIN_COMPONENT) or how the costs are worked out by size (cost per acre, or per km of road access...). You can use the COST_TYPE column to identify what kind of cost you have described. You can also track whether a cost should be reported - this will help you when it comes time to report cost summaries, so you don't accidentally double dip the costs.
The FIN_XREF table is used to track the relationships between finance entities, such as the relationships between AFE and Cost center numbers, or which numbers supercede (or are part of) others.
