System Overviews > General System Structures

The creditors system for each level, is based on the same basic principles, even though their primary application is based on the Property level requirements. The various tools and facilities available allow the effective use of the creditors system on all levels of the system. It has been written to accommodate practical security, internal control, volume and remote site data capture requirements.

Legal Relationships

The creditors system has been written based on the Property to creditor legal relationship. It often appears that the relationship with the creditor is with the Agent , but in fact the Agent is actually just that. The structure of the system attempts to reflect the correct relationship, keeping each Property separate from each other, relative to each creditor.

The same structure has been used on Agent/Division level, even though the legal relationship is different. This has been done to allow for divisional accounting, with the grouping facilities mentioned below combining as necessary.

System File Structure

All Agent and Property creditors are stored in a common creditors master file, and flagged accordingly. Each Agent or Property contains only the actual creditors used by it. It can however, use any creditor on a central, regionalised data base of all creditors, by picking off a list of available creditors, based on it's region. This has been done to accommodate the legal structures, provide for operational efficiency, and maintain smaller size files. Each Agent and Property is linked to a region, which could be a common region in businesses that run from one central point.

Grouping facilities

Although the legal relationship is between a Property and it's creditors, the Agent normally deals with a creditor in respect of many properties. To assist in reducing the administrative difficulty of the payment of many creditors on behalf of many properties, the system contains programs to automatically build payment batches for cheques and electronic payments. They scan all the properties that the relevant user has access to, and build up the relevant type of batch for all currently outstanding creditors for which funds are available to pay.

Central payment site with remote invoice capture points

To facilitate either remote site data entry, and central payment, two features have been included. The ability of a remote operator being able to preview what will be paid centrally (displaying creditors not being paid due to a lack of available funds), and their ability to locally prevent payment of an individual creditor for an individual Property.

Future dated payment

Each invoice can be captured when received, but scheduled to pay at some future date. This brings the cost and the creditor into the books of the Property/Agent , but does not bring it up for payment until the due date has been reached.