In this article we will setup OFBIZ with accounting preferences for Kristine’s Biz, a fictitious sole trader created to represent the company used in Chapter 3: Section 4: Example 1 of Open Tuition’s FA Lecture Notes.
We will create accounting transactions for this company in a later article.
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Create a company and configure as an accounting organisation
You need to get OFBiz running on your computer. See our article on getting OFBiz up and running: OFBiz from scratch: Install and run OFBiz.
Create the company
OFBiz represents people and organisations as Parties. For most use cases in OFBiz you will need to create a Party to represent the organisation that OFBiz is being run on behalf of – i.e. your company and/or companies you are bookkeeping for.
In the example scenario (Chapter 3, Section 4, Example 1), we are keeping the books for Kristine, a sole trader.
Note: This articles contains links to OFBiz screens accessed at https://localhost:8443. You may need to replace localhost:8443 according to your specific deployment.
To create the party representing Kristine’s company, access the Party Manager app by visiting https://localhost:8443/partymgr and click the Create New Party Group button.
If you followed the installation and deployment instructions from article, OFBiz from scratch: Install and run OFBiz, and are prompted to login, then your username will be localadmin and the password will be ofbiz.
For now, just fill in the Group Name field with value, Kristine’s Biz and then click the Save button.
Clicking Save will create the Party representing Kristine’s Biz and display the Profile screen. We need to assign the Internal Organisation role to the company to make it eligible to be an Accounting Organisation within OFBiz.
Click the Roles button.
Select Internal Organization from Add To Role selection box and click the Add button.
You should see Internal Organisation added to the list of roles for the Kristine’s Biz party.
Other party information
From the Party Profile screen we can add further information, such as Contact Mechanisms (Postal address, email address, etc.), if desired. This information would be useful when producing business documents such as invoices, but for the purpose of this bookkeeping example no further information is needed.
The accounting organisation
We need to create an accounting organisation to store accounts related information for Kristine’s Biz.
To do this, visit https://localhost:8443/accounting and click on the Organization GL Settings button.
The next screen will show a list of Available Internal Accounting Organizations which will be empty. It is possible to manage multiple accounting organisations in a single OFBiz deployment.
To create a new accounting organisation for Kristine’s Biz, click Create new accounting company.
At the Create new accounting company screen, select the organisation for Kristine’s Biz and click the Create new accounting company button.
At the next screen we set the accounting preferences for Kristine’s Biz. Preferences are used to set fiscal year dates, methods of generated sequence numbers for business documents like quotes and invoices, prefixes to use in invoice and quote numbers, and the method of calculating Cost of Goods Sold.
For this example, we are interested in setting the Base Currency for Kristine’s Biz.
Set the base currency to American Dollar – USD, matching the currency used in the OpenTuition example.
Click the Add button to save the preferences.
Create accounting time periods
From the accounting organisation’s setup screen, click the Time Period button.
On the Time Period screen we can create new time periods. Start by creating a time period for the financial year:
Parent Period ID: | Leave blank |
Period Type ID: | Fiscal Year |
Period Num | 1 |
Period Name | FY2023 |
From Date | 2023-01-01 |
Through Date | 2024-01-01 |
Is Closed | No |
OFBiz 18 and later allow you to set the time for the From and Through Dates. You can set these to 00:00:00 hrs by changing the sliders in the user interface.
Next we shall create a time period for January 2023 and relate it to the 2023 Fiscal Year.
Parent Period ID: | FY2023 |
Period Type ID: | Fiscal Month |
Period Num | 1 |
Period Name | M2023-01 |
From Date | 2023-01-01 |
Through Date | 2023-02-01 |
Is Closed | No |
Fill in the details for the new Time Period and click the Create button.
Let’s create one more time period, this time for February 2023.
Parent Period ID: | FY2023 |
Period Type ID: | Fiscal Month |
Period Num | 2 |
Period Name | M2023-02 |
From Date | 2023-02-01 |
Through Date | 2023-03-01 |
Is Closed | No |
Next steps
We have now created a party to represent the company, Kristine’s Biz. The party was assigned the Internal Organization role, configuring OFBiz so that it will manage information on behalf of that party.
An Accounting Organisation was then created for Kristine’s Biz, with preferences setting the base currency of the organisation. In scenarios where other currencies are used for accounting transactions, they are generally converted to this base currency.
To start keeping books for Kristine’s Biz, we still need to set up General Ledger Accounts for the organisation. See the next article in this series for a walk through.
