Posted: Tues, Jan 11, 2000 at 20:25:54 (EST)
Original: NA
Posted by: Todd Boyle	Recipient: All
Email Address: Not Provided
Subject: Egoless General Ledger

It is becoming increasingly clear that internet hosted applications will be the superior overall solution for very many business processes. Business services providers expert in their domains will build applications that can be delivered over the wire, that are better than anything in the particular OS. There is a widely recognized need for a horizontal accounting platform to serve multiple heterogenous business processes now running on Services-DotComs. a. Internal control over all these internet modules b. Treasury/cash backbone c. consolidation and eliminations of multiple BSP-DotComs which are running as sub-ledgers d. Management reporting and GAAP reporting e. tax reporting/management etc. Heres' what I think it should look like: Get a MMDS back end. http://www.timesten.com/index.html http://www.iweek.com/story/IWK19990216S0001 http://computer.org/tkde/tk1998/k0859abs.htm http://www.ispras.ru/~knizhnik/fastdb/readme.htm http://www.edtn.com/scribe/reference/webscan/mn00561a.htm Create an egoless Webledger. The GL would have no user interface. The user would only talk with it by XML. To start a new company the new user must first identify their LDAP server. All employees, customers, vendors and extranet security etc. are controlled by their LDAP server. For ordinary customers/vendors the LDAP server is just used as an address list (way overkill but simple architecture that unifies their CRM via email, IP telephony, extranet permissions, etc.) The new user must then upload several XML documents compliant with the EgoLess General Ledger DTD 1. Their chart of accounts structure (having account code, description required and up to maybe five or ten optional userdefined attributes on each account) 2. The chart of accounts complying with the constraints they issued in their COA structure 3. Their General Ledger transactions table DTD, obviously having up to 20 or 30 columns of their choosing, and 4. General Ledger transactions such as starting trial balance You would load the DTDs into the DOM and just loop thru and build SQL to create table, and create a typical ultra-simple General ledger with only the linking field being the Chart of Accounts. With further E.G.L. DTDs the users could define relations for their usedefined columns to be supported by additional tables. For example suppose you had created a 'ProductSegment' column in the transaction table. You could then submit another XML document to command the E.G.L. to create a ProductSegments table and link it to the transaction table, to establish integrity. The EgoLess General Ledger would then rely on 3rd party tools for reporting. The GL would have no user interface. it would only reply to valid OAGIS requests, by delivering query results in XML as valid OAGIS replies. It would be fast. It would just be a good citizen in the computing environment. Todd