{ "version": "v1", "generated": "2026-09-08", "lastVerified": null, "licence": "Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)", "licenceUrl": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/", "attribution": "Stackmark — stackmark.co", "self": "https://stackmark.co/api/v1/glossary.json", "fields": [ "slug", "term", "definition", "whyItMatters", "seeAlso", "modules" ], "count": 303, "data": [ { "slug": "acceptance-criteria", "term": "Acceptance criteria", "definition": "The stated conditions a deliverable must meet to be accepted, ideally testable and agreed before work starts. Acceptance usually triggers payment.", "whyItMatters": "Ask what happens if criteria are not met and who decides, because acceptance defined as \"reasonable satisfaction\" is a dispute waiting for a deadline.", "seeAlso": "statement-of-work; user-acceptance-testing; milestone-billing; change-order", "modules": "project-management" }, { "slug": "access-review", "term": "Access review", "definition": "The periodic check that each person's system access is still appropriate to their job, performed by managers or control owners and evidenced.", "whyItMatters": "Ask whether the system can generate the review, capture decisions and remove revoked access, because reviews performed on exported spreadsheets rarely result in anything being removed.", "seeAlso": "role-based-access-control; segregation-of-duties; key-control; audit-evidence", "modules": "ai-features" }, { "slug": "account-reconciliation", "term": "Account reconciliation", "definition": "Proving that a ledger balance agrees with an independent source or with the detail that supports it — a bank statement, a subledger, a schedule of open items — and explaining anything that does not. It is the evidence a balance is real.", "whyItMatters": "Ask whether reconciliations are prepared, reviewed and signed inside the system with the supporting file attached, because reconciliations kept in a shared drive cannot be reported on or audited efficiently.", "seeAlso": "bank-reconciliation; balance-sheet-substantiation; period-close; subledger", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "accounts-payable", "term": "Accounts payable", "definition": "The money a company owes suppliers for goods and services already delivered, and the process that gets from a supplier invoice to a payment: capture, coding, matching, approval, payment run, and the ledger entries each step creates. It is usually the highest-volume transactional area in a finance function.", "whyItMatters": "Ask how many touches a routine invoice takes from arrival to payment in a demonstration with your own document, because the difference between three and eight touches is most of an AP team's workload.", "seeAlso": "three-way-matching; purchase-order; goods-receipt; payment-run; accounts-receivable", "modules": "financial-management; procurement" }, { "slug": "accounts-receivable", "term": "Accounts receivable", "definition": "The money customers owe for goods and services already invoiced, and the process around it: invoicing, cash application, credit control, chasing, and write-off of what will not arrive. It is the working-capital lever finance teams can move fastest.", "whyItMatters": "Ask to see automatic cash application against a bank file with partial payments and short payments in it, because a demonstration on clean data tells you nothing about your Monday morning.", "seeAlso": "cash-application; dunning; credit-limit; aging-report; accounts-payable", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "accrual", "term": "Accrual", "definition": "An entry that books a cost or a revenue in the period it belongs to rather than the period the cash moves in. If a supplier delivered in March and invoices in April, the March books carry an accrual for the expected amount, which is then reversed or matched off when the real invoice lands.", "whyItMatters": "Most of the manual journal volume in a close is accruals, so ask how a system builds them from open purchase orders and receipts, whether it reverses them automatically next period, and whether anyone can post one without a second pair of eyes.", "seeAlso": "period-close; goods-receipt; prepaid-expense; journal-entry", "modules": "financial-management; procurement" }, { "slug": "ach", "term": "ACH", "definition": "The Automated Clearing House network used for domestic electronic payments in the United States, settling in batches over one or more business days rather than instantly.", "whyItMatters": "Ask how return codes and failed payments are handled automatically, because a returned payment that no one processes leaves an invoice looking settled when it is not.", "seeAlso": "payment-file; sepa; payment-run; bank-connectivity", "modules": "financial-management; localizations" }, { "slug": "adjusting-entry", "term": "Adjusting entry", "definition": "A journal posted during the close to correct or complete the period's records: accruals, deferrals, reclassifications and error corrections. Volume of adjusting entries is a reasonable proxy for how well upstream processes work.", "whyItMatters": "Ask for the count of manual journals in a typical month from a comparable customer, because that number tells you more about the system's fit than any feature list.", "seeAlso": "accrual; reversing-entry; journal-entry; period-close", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "aging-report", "term": "Aging report", "definition": "A schedule of open receivables or payables bucketed by how overdue they are, typically current, 1–30, 31–60, 61–90 and 90-plus days. It is the standard starting point for collections work and for estimating what will not be collected.", "whyItMatters": "Ask whether the buckets, the as-of date and the currency basis can be changed without a report developer, since every credit committee eventually wants a cut the standard report does not offer.", "seeAlso": "accounts-receivable; bad-debt-provision; dunning; collections", "modules": "financial-management; business-intelligence" }, { "slug": "allocation", "term": "Allocation", "definition": "The rule that spreads a pooled cost across the cost centres, projects or entities that consumed it — rent by floor area, IT by headcount, shared services by transaction volume. Allocations run as part of the close and are usually the least documented step in it.", "whyItMatters": "Ask how allocation rules are defined, versioned and reversed, because a system where they live in a spreadsheet outside the ledger gives you numbers no one can trace six months later.", "seeAlso": "cost-centre; dimensions; period-close; management-reporting", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "amortisation", "term": "Amortisation", "definition": "Writing off the cost of an intangible asset — software, a licence, capitalised development — across the periods that benefit from it. Mechanically it works like depreciation; the distinction is the nature of the asset, not the arithmetic.", "whyItMatters": "Ask whether the schedule lives in the asset register or in a spreadsheet, and how a mid-life change in useful life or an impairment is handled, since both are common and both are audited.", "seeAlso": "depreciation; fixed-asset-register; capital-expenditure; prepaid-expense", "modules": "financial-management; asset-management" }, { "slug": "annual-recurring-revenue", "term": "Annual recurring revenue", "definition": "The annualised value of subscription contracts in force at a point in time, excluding one-off fees. It is a contract measure rather than an accounting one, and it is not the same as recognised revenue.", "whyItMatters": "Ask how the figure is derived from contract data in the system, since a metric assembled in a spreadsheet from exports will not reconcile to the ledger when someone finally checks.", "seeAlso": "monthly-recurring-revenue; bookings; billings; revenue-recognition", "modules": "financial-management; crm" }, { "slug": "annual-support-fee", "term": "Annual support fee", "definition": "The recurring charge on a perpetual licence for updates, fixes and assistance, typically a percentage of the original licence value and subject to annual increase.", "whyItMatters": "Ask what caps the annual increase and whether the fee is calculated on list or discounted value, since a percentage of list on a heavily discounted deal is a common and expensive construction.", "seeAlso": "perpetual-licence; price-uplift-cap; total-cost-of-ownership", "modules": "ai-features" }, { "slug": "api-first", "term": "API-first", "definition": "A design approach where the interface is built before or alongside the user experience, so anything the screens can do can also be done programmatically.", "whyItMatters": "Test the claim by asking which screens do something the API cannot, since in most products the answer is a long list and that list defines your automation ceiling.", "seeAlso": "rest-api; webhook; ipaas", "modules": "ai-features" }, { "slug": "approval-workflow", "term": "Approval workflow", "definition": "The routing rules that send a document to the right approvers in the right order, by value, cost centre, category or exception, with delegation, escalation and a record of each decision.", "whyItMatters": "Ask how a workflow is changed and by whom, since approval rules change more often than any other configuration and a change that requires the vendor becomes a change nobody makes.", "seeAlso": "requisition; segregation-of-duties; audit-trail; non-po-invoice", "modules": "procurement; financial-management" }, { "slug": "asset-hierarchy", "term": "Asset hierarchy", "definition": "The structure recording how assets contain one another — a site, a line, a machine, a component — so cost, maintenance and depreciation can be reported at any level.", "whyItMatters": "Ask whether the finance register and the maintenance hierarchy are the same structure, since maintaining two versions of the same tree is a permanent overhead.", "seeAlso": "fixed-asset-register; preventive-maintenance; depreciation; cost-centre", "modules": "asset-management" }, { "slug": "audit-evidence", "term": "Audit evidence", "definition": "The records and documentation supporting a number or a control: the invoice, the approval, the reconciliation, the system log showing who posted what. Evidence has to be retrievable, not merely to exist.", "whyItMatters": "Ask how long documents and logs are retained, in what form they can be handed to an auditor, and what an extract costs, since retrieval effort is a real annual cost of the system.", "seeAlso": "audit-trail; external-audit; sampling; pbc-list", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "audit-file", "term": "Tax audit file", "definition": "Any prescribed extract an authority can demand of a company's accounting records, of which SAF-T is the best-known family. Content, format and retention are set by the authority.", "whyItMatters": "Ask how long records remain extractable after a system upgrade or a migration, because the obligation outlives the software far more often than buyers expect.", "seeAlso": "saf-t; statutory-filing; audit-evidence; data-retention", "modules": "localizations; financial-management" }, { "slug": "audit-trail", "term": "Audit trail", "definition": "The record the system keeps of who did what to a transaction and when — who entered it, who changed a field, who approved it, and what the value was before the change. A usable trail is queryable and cannot be edited from inside the application by the people it records.", "whyItMatters": "Auditors will ask for evidence that a specific approval happened, so it is worth making a vendor pull a real before-and-after history on screen in the demo rather than accepting that the system \"is fully audited\".", "seeAlso": "segregation-of-duties; journal-entry; period-close", "modules": "financial-management; business-intelligence" }, { "slug": "auto-renewal", "term": "Automatic renewal", "definition": "A contract term under which the agreement continues for a further period unless notice is given by a stated deadline. It benefits whichever party is paying attention.", "whyItMatters": "Ask for a report of every contract by notice deadline, because this is the single most valuable contract report a finance team can have and it is rarely built until it is needed.", "seeAlso": "renewal; termination-for-convenience; price-uplift-cap", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "backlog", "term": "Backlog", "definition": "Contracted work or subscription value not yet delivered or invoiced. In projects it is unperformed scope; in subscriptions it is the remainder of the term.", "whyItMatters": "Ask whether backlog can be aged and reported by delivery period, because a backlog figure with no timing attached tells a board nothing about next year.", "seeAlso": "bookings; performance-obligation; project-accounting; revenue-schedule", "modules": "financial-management; project-management" }, { "slug": "bad-debt-provision", "term": "Bad debt provision", "definition": "The estimate of receivables that will not be collected, recognised as an expense before any specific invoice is written off. Approaches range from an aging-based percentage to expected-credit-loss models.", "whyItMatters": "Ask whether the provision can be calculated inside the system from the aging and a policy matrix, since a manual quarterly estimate is both an audit topic and a recurring close task.", "seeAlso": "write-off; aging-report; accounts-receivable; provision", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "balance-sheet", "term": "Balance sheet", "definition": "The statement of what a company owns, owes and holds in equity at a single point in time, with assets equal to liabilities plus equity by construction. Every posting in a double-entry system keeps that identity true.", "whyItMatters": "Ask to see a balance sheet drilled from a line down to the individual journals behind it in one session, because a system that cannot do that turns every audit question into a project.", "seeAlso": "income-statement; cash-flow-statement; trial-balance; double-entry-bookkeeping; general-ledger", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "balance-sheet-substantiation", "term": "Balance sheet substantiation", "definition": "The discipline of holding, for every balance-sheet account, a current schedule that explains what makes it up and who owns it. Substantiation is broader than reconciliation: some accounts have no external source, only a calculation.", "whyItMatters": "Ask for the standard report showing every account with its reconciliation status and owner, since a group that cannot produce that view discovers unexplained balances at year end rather than monthly.", "seeAlso": "account-reconciliation; provision; close-checklist; period-close", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "bank-connectivity", "term": "Bank connectivity", "definition": "How the system exchanges files and messages with banks: host-to-host transfer, a bank portal, a multi-bank network, or an API. It determines how quickly balances and transactions arrive.", "whyItMatters": "Ask which of your banks are supported out of the box and how a new bank is added, since connectivity projects are frequently longer than the ERP module they serve.", "seeAlso": "payment-file; bank-reconciliation; treasury-management; cash-positioning", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "bank-reconciliation", "term": "Bank reconciliation", "definition": "Agreeing the cash balance in your ledger to the balance the bank reports, and explaining every difference — payments issued but not yet cleared, deposits in transit, bank charges you had not booked. Modern systems import a statement feed and propose matches, leaving a human to clear the exceptions.", "whyItMatters": "Auto-matching rates quoted in a demo are usually measured on tidy single-currency data, so ask what happens to a part-paid invoice, a batched customer receipt covering twelve invoices, and a foreign currency account, because that is where the manual work actually lives.", "seeAlso": "subledger; general-ledger; period-close", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "batch-traceability", "term": "Batch traceability", "definition": "The ability to follow a batch or lot forward to every customer who received it and backward to every input it contained, within a defined time.", "whyItMatters": "Ask for a demonstration of a full trace in both directions against a stated time target, because in food, pharmaceutical and aerospace supply chains that time is a regulatory expectation.", "seeAlso": "quality-inspection; non-conformance; inventory-management-basics; serial-number-tracking", "modules": "quality-management; inventory-management" }, { "slug": "benchmark-clause", "term": "Benchmark clause", "definition": "A contractual right to test pricing against the market during the term and to adjust it if the comparison shows the price is out of line, using an agreed method.", "whyItMatters": "Ask how the comparison set and the adjustment mechanism are defined, since a benchmark clause with no method is a right to have a conversation.", "seeAlso": "price-uplift-cap; multi-year-commitment; total-cost-of-ownership", "modules": "ai-features" }, { "slug": "bill-of-materials", "term": "Bill of materials", "definition": "The structured list of components, quantities and sub-assemblies needed to make one unit of a product, often several levels deep. Planning, costing and shop-floor execution all read from it.", "whyItMatters": "Ask how engineering changes are versioned and how in-flight orders are treated when a bill changes, since an ERP that cannot answer that pushes the problem into spreadsheets on the shop floor.", "seeAlso": "standard-costing; routing; work-order; engineering-change-order", "modules": "manufacturing-management" }, { "slug": "billable-hours", "term": "Billable hours", "definition": "Time recorded against work a client can be charged for, as distinct from internal or written-off time. The distinction is a coding decision made at entry.", "whyItMatters": "Ask how write-offs are approved and reported, since time silently reclassified as non-billable makes both utilisation and project margin look better than they are.", "seeAlso": "timesheet; utilisation-rate; time-and-materials; project-costing", "modules": "project-management" }, { "slug": "billings", "term": "Billings", "definition": "What has actually been invoiced in a period, regardless of when it will be recognised as revenue or collected. It is the bridge between bookings and cash.", "whyItMatters": "Ask whether billing schedules are generated from the contract automatically, since manual invoicing of subscription contracts is the most common source of missed revenue.", "seeAlso": "bookings; revenue-recognition; subscription-billing; deferred-revenue", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "bookings", "term": "Bookings", "definition": "The total contract value signed in a period, whether or not any of it has been invoiced or delivered. It measures sales activity, not revenue.", "whyItMatters": "Ask how bookings, billings and revenue are reconciled in standard reporting, because these three are routinely confused in board packs and the system should make the bridge visible.", "seeAlso": "billings; annual-recurring-revenue; revenue-recognition; backlog", "modules": "crm; financial-management" }, { "slug": "budget-check", "term": "Budget check", "definition": "Testing a proposed commitment against remaining budget for a cost centre, project or account, and blocking or routing for approval when it would exceed it. Commitments already made are counted as consumed.", "whyItMatters": "Ask whether the check counts open requisitions and purchase orders as well as posted costs, since a check that looks only at actuals will approve the same money twice.", "seeAlso": "requisition; commitment-accounting; cost-centre; approval-workflow", "modules": "procurement; financial-management" }, { "slug": "business-intelligence-basics", "term": "Business intelligence", "definition": "The tooling and practice of turning transactional data into reports, dashboards and analysis that people act on, including the semantic layer that gives measures agreed definitions.", "whyItMatters": "Ask where measure definitions live, because two dashboards computing margin differently is the fastest way to lose trust in a new system.", "seeAlso": "data-warehouse; management-reporting; single-source-of-truth; etl", "modules": "business-intelligence" }, { "slug": "capacity-planning", "term": "Capacity planning", "definition": "Checking whether the plant, the people and the machines can actually deliver the plan, at the level of work centres and time buckets. Rough-cut planning tests the shape of the plan; finite scheduling tests the detail.", "whyItMatters": "Ask whether planning is finite or infinite by default, because an infinite-capacity plan will always look achievable and will always be wrong in the same direction.", "seeAlso": "work-order; routing; material-requirements-planning; demand-forecasting", "modules": "manufacturing-management; supply-chain-management" }, { "slug": "capital-expenditure", "term": "Capital expenditure", "definition": "Spend on something expected to be useful for more than one period, which is added to the balance sheet and depreciated rather than charged straight to profit. Where the line sits between capitalising and expensing depends on the accounting framework, the policy the business sets, and in some cases on tax rules that differ from both.", "whyItMatters": "Ask whether the system can accumulate costs against an asset under construction — purchase orders, invoices, internal time — and capitalise the total in one step, because doing that by hand is how assets go missing from the register.", "seeAlso": "fixed-asset-register; depreciation; purchase-order; project-accounting", "modules": "asset-management; project-management; financial-management" }, { "slug": "cash-application", "term": "Cash application", "definition": "Matching money received to the invoices it settles, including partial payments, deductions, and payments that arrive with no useful reference. Automation rates here are the difference between a small and a large collections team.", "whyItMatters": "Ask what percentage of a real bank file the system matches without human help, using your file rather than the demonstration one, because that single number sizes the whole function.", "seeAlso": "accounts-receivable; remittance-advice; bank-reconciliation; lockbox", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "cash-flow-forecasting", "term": "Cash flow forecasting", "definition": "Projecting cash in and out over weeks or months from receivables, payables, payroll, tax and financing, and comparing the projection to what actually happened.", "whyItMatters": "Ask whether the forecast is built from open items in the ledger or typed in, since a forecast that does not refresh from the data is a document rather than a tool.", "seeAlso": "cash-positioning; treasury-management; working-capital; aging-report", "modules": "financial-management; business-intelligence" }, { "slug": "cash-flow-statement", "term": "Cash flow statement", "definition": "The statement reconciling profit to the movement in cash, split into operating, investing and financing activities. It can be built directly from cash transactions or indirectly by adjusting profit for non-cash items and working-capital movements.", "whyItMatters": "Ask whether the system produces it from the ledger or expects a spreadsheet, and by which method, because an indirect statement assembled by hand every month is a recurring close cost few buyers price in.", "seeAlso": "balance-sheet; income-statement; working-capital; period-close", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "cash-positioning", "term": "Cash positioning", "definition": "Establishing how much cash is where today and what is expected in and out over the coming days, so funding decisions can be made deliberately rather than reactively.", "whyItMatters": "Ask how bank balances arrive and at what time, because a position built from yesterday's statements is a position that funds decisions a day late.", "seeAlso": "treasury-management; bank-connectivity; cash-flow-forecasting", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "change-order", "term": "Change order", "definition": "A documented, priced and approved change to a contract's scope, schedule or price. It is the mechanism that keeps a fixed-price arrangement honest on both sides.", "whyItMatters": "Ask a prospective implementation partner for its change-order rate on comparable projects, because that percentage is the most informative number in the whole commercial discussion.", "seeAlso": "fixed-price-contract; statement-of-work; change-request-rate; project-accounting", "modules": "project-management" }, { "slug": "change-request-rate", "term": "Change request rate", "definition": "The proportion of a project's value that arrived as changes after the original contract. It measures how well scope was understood, on both sides.", "whyItMatters": "Ask candidate partners for this figure across recent comparable projects, since it is the single most predictive number available about how your project will actually be priced.", "seeAlso": "change-order; implementation-multiple; statement-of-work; fit-gap-analysis", "modules": "project-management" }, { "slug": "chart-of-accounts", "term": "Chart of accounts", "definition": "The structured list of accounts every posting has to land in — assets, liabilities, equity, income and expense — and the numbering scheme that organises them. It sets the shape of the primary financial statements and, in many older systems, was also forced to carry department, location and product coding inside the account number itself.", "whyItMatters": "Redesigning it after go-live is one of the most painful changes a finance team can make, so establish early whether the system separates the account from its analysis coding, or whether growth means inventing thousands of new account numbers.", "seeAlso": "dimensions; general-ledger; cost-centre; trial-balance", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "churn", "term": "Churn", "definition": "Recurring revenue lost when customers cancel or reduce, expressed as a rate over a period. Gross churn counts losses; net churn offsets them against expansion.", "whyItMatters": "Ask whether the system distinguishes cancellation from downgrade and from non-renewal, since a single churn number hides three different commercial problems.", "seeAlso": "expansion-revenue; renewal; monthly-recurring-revenue; annual-recurring-revenue", "modules": "crm; business-intelligence" }, { "slug": "clearing-account", "term": "Clearing account", "definition": "An account used deliberately as a staging point between two steps of a process — goods received not yet invoiced, payments in transit, payroll clearing. A healthy clearing account nets to nil once both sides land.", "whyItMatters": "Ask which clearing accounts the standard configuration creates and how their age is monitored, since an unmonitored clearing account behaves exactly like a suspense account.", "seeAlso": "suspense-account; goods-received-not-invoiced; bank-reconciliation", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "close-checklist", "term": "Close checklist", "definition": "The ordered list of tasks that turns a period's transactions into reported numbers, with owners, dependencies and deadlines: cut-offs, accruals, allocations, reconciliations, reviews and sign-off.", "whyItMatters": "Ask whether the checklist is a feature of the system with status and dependencies, or a spreadsheet, because the second answer means nobody can see where a late close is actually stuck.", "seeAlso": "period-close; balance-sheet-substantiation; soft-close; hard-close", "modules": "financial-management; project-management" }, { "slug": "closing-entry", "term": "Closing entry", "definition": "An entry made as part of closing a period or year: transferring the result to equity, clearing temporary accounts, or booking the last adjustments before a lock.", "whyItMatters": "Ask which closing entries the system generates and which are manual, since every manual one is a recurring task and a recurring opportunity to get it wrong.", "seeAlso": "adjusting-entry; retained-earnings; year-end-close; journal-entry", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "collections", "term": "Collections", "definition": "The work of getting overdue money in: prioritising accounts, contacting customers, recording promises to pay, resolving disputes and escalating. It is a workflow discipline more than an accounting one.", "whyItMatters": "Ask whether collectors work from a worklist inside the system with contact history attached, because a team working from an exported aging spreadsheet loses every promise-to-pay it ever recorded.", "seeAlso": "dunning; aging-report; bad-debt-provision; credit-limit", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "commitment-accounting", "term": "Commitment accounting", "definition": "Recording obligations as they are entered into — an approved requisition or an issued purchase order — so budget consumption reflects what is promised, not only what is invoiced.", "whyItMatters": "Ask whether commitments are visible in budget reporting and how they are released when an order is closed short, because stale commitments make budgets look consumed when they are not.", "seeAlso": "budget-check; purchase-order; goods-received-not-invoiced; encumbrance", "modules": "financial-management; procurement" }, { "slug": "concurrent-user-licence", "term": "Concurrent user licence", "definition": "Licensing by simultaneous sessions rather than by named individuals, so a larger population can share a smaller number of licences.", "whyItMatters": "Ask what happens when the limit is reached — queued, refused, or automatically expanded and billed — since the third answer removes your cost control.", "seeAlso": "named-user-licence; consumption-pricing; true-up", "modules": "ai-features" }, { "slug": "conference-room-pilot", "term": "Conference room pilot", "definition": "A structured session where the configured system is walked through with real scenarios and real data by the people who will use it, before build is finished.", "whyItMatters": "Insist on at least one with your own data and your own edge cases, since it is the cheapest point at which a fundamental misfit can still be found.", "seeAlso": "fit-gap-analysis; walkthrough; user-acceptance-testing; requirements-traceability", "modules": "project-management" }, { "slug": "consumption-pricing", "term": "Consumption pricing", "definition": "Charging by measured usage — documents, transactions, storage, compute — rather than by user, so cost scales with activity.", "whyItMatters": "Model your own volumes against the meter and ask for the overage rate, since consumption pricing turns a growth year into an unbudgeted cost increase.", "seeAlso": "module-based-licensing; true-up; total-cost-of-ownership; usage-based-billing", "modules": "ai-features" }, { "slug": "continuous-transaction-controls", "term": "Continuous transaction controls", "definition": "Regimes where transaction data is reported to, or cleared by, a tax authority at or near the moment of invoicing, rather than aggregated into a periodic return.", "whyItMatters": "Ask which of these regimes the vendor supports natively, since a clearance failure blocks invoicing entirely rather than merely delaying a filing.", "seeAlso": "e-invoicing-clearance; digital-reporting-requirements; saf-t; peppol", "modules": "localizations" }, { "slug": "contract-catalogue", "term": "Contract catalogue", "definition": "A list of goods and services at agreed prices from agreed suppliers, presented to requisitioners so that buying the right thing at the right price is the easy path.", "whyItMatters": "Ask who maintains catalogue content and how price changes flow through, since a stale catalogue trains people to buy outside it and undoes the control it was built for.", "seeAlso": "punchout; spend-under-management; requisition; e-procurement", "modules": "procurement" }, { "slug": "contract-liability", "term": "Contract liability", "definition": "The obligation to transfer goods or services for which a customer has already paid or been invoiced — deferred revenue under the current revenue standards' vocabulary.", "whyItMatters": "Ask how the balance is proved back to contracts and schedules, since this is often the largest liability on a software company's balance sheet and the hardest to substantiate.", "seeAlso": "deferred-revenue; performance-obligation; revenue-schedule; balance-sheet-substantiation", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "control-owner", "term": "Control owner", "definition": "The named person accountable for a control operating as described, and usually for producing its evidence. Ownership sits with the business process, not with the audit function.", "whyItMatters": "Ask whether ownership is recorded in the system against the control and its evidence, because ownership held in a document goes stale the first time someone changes role.", "seeAlso": "internal-control; key-control; sox-controls; segregation-of-duties", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "corrective-action", "term": "Corrective action", "definition": "The documented response to a non-conformance: containment, root-cause analysis, the fix, verification that it worked, and closure. Regulated sectors require the full trail.", "whyItMatters": "Ask how effectiveness verification is evidenced, because an action closed without proof that it worked is the finding auditors and regulators return to.", "seeAlso": "non-conformance; quality-inspection; batch-traceability; audit-evidence", "modules": "quality-management" }, { "slug": "cost-centre", "term": "Cost centre", "definition": "A unit of the business that costs are collected against and someone is accountable for — a team, a site, a function. It is a reporting and budgeting construct rather than a legal one, and it does not produce its own statutory accounts.", "whyItMatters": "How a system models cost centres decides whether a departmental manager can be given a budget and a report on their own numbers without seeing the whole company, which is a permissions question as much as a reporting one.", "seeAlso": "dimensions; chart-of-accounts; legal-entity", "modules": "financial-management; business-intelligence" }, { "slug": "country-by-country-reporting", "term": "Country-by-country reporting", "definition": "The annual disclosure by large groups of revenue, profit, tax paid, employees and assets in each jurisdiction, filed with tax authorities and increasingly published.", "whyItMatters": "Ask whether the data can be produced from the ledger by entity and jurisdiction without a manual mapping exercise, since this filing recurs annually and grows in scope.", "seeAlso": "transfer-pricing; group-reporting; statutory-filing; pillar-two", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "credit-hold", "term": "Credit hold", "definition": "The block placed on a customer's orders or shipments when exposure exceeds the agreed limit or invoices are far overdue. Releasing it is a controlled decision, not a clerical one.", "whyItMatters": "Ask who can release a hold and whether the release is logged with a reason, because this is a control that tends to be delegated informally until an audit asks about it.", "seeAlso": "credit-limit; collections; segregation-of-duties", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "credit-limit", "term": "Credit limit", "definition": "The maximum exposure a company will accept to a customer, set from credit data, payment history and judgement, and checked when orders are taken. Exposure usually counts open invoices plus unshipped orders.", "whyItMatters": "Ask exactly what is included in the exposure calculation and when the check fires in the order flow, since a limit enforced only at invoicing does not prevent the shipment.", "seeAlso": "credit-hold; collections; accounts-receivable; order-to-cash", "modules": "financial-management; crm" }, { "slug": "credit-memo", "term": "Credit memo", "definition": "A document that reduces what a customer owes, issued for a return, a pricing error, a service credit or a settled dispute. It reverses part or all of an invoice and has to reach both the ledger and the receivable it relates to.", "whyItMatters": "Ask who can raise one and up to what value without a second approval, because credit memos are the standard route for revenue to leave a company without anyone noticing.", "seeAlso": "accounts-receivable; debit-memo; segregation-of-duties; write-off", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "crm-basics", "term": "CRM", "definition": "The system of record for customers and prospects: contacts, activity, pipeline, quotes and cases, feeding the commercial front of order to cash.", "whyItMatters": "Ask where the customer master lives when the ERP and the CRM disagree, because that decision determines which system creates duplicates for the other to clean up.", "seeAlso": "customer-master; quote-to-cash; price-book; master-data-management", "modules": "crm" }, { "slug": "currency-translation", "term": "Currency translation", "definition": "Restating an entity's results and balances from its functional currency into the group's presentation currency, typically at closing rates for the balance sheet and average rates for the income statement, with the difference taken to a translation reserve.", "whyItMatters": "Ask to see the translation calculation and the reserve movement in a demonstration with three currencies, because this is where a consolidation either proves itself or becomes a spreadsheet.", "seeAlso": "functional-currency; presentation-currency; fx-revaluation; group-reporting", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "customer-master", "term": "Customer master", "definition": "The record of each customer: legal and trading names, ship-to and bill-to addresses, tax status, credit terms and limits, and the price agreements that apply.", "whyItMatters": "Ask how duplicates are prevented and merged, since a customer that exists three times has three credit limits and no usable exposure figure.", "seeAlso": "credit-limit; master-data-management; order-to-cash; tax-identifier-validation", "modules": "crm; financial-management" }, { "slug": "customs-duty", "term": "Customs duty", "definition": "Tax charged on goods crossing a border, determined by tariff classification, origin and value. It is a cost of the goods, not a recoverable tax like value-added tax usually is.", "whyItMatters": "Ask whether tariff codes and origin are held on the item master and flow to declarations, since a system that cannot state origin makes preferential trade agreements unusable.", "seeAlso": "landed-cost; intrastat; vat; inventory-valuation", "modules": "supply-chain-management; localizations" }, { "slug": "cutover", "term": "Cutover", "definition": "The window in which you stop transacting in the old system and start in the new one — final balances extracted and loaded, open items brought across, interfaces switched, and the point of no return crossed. It is usually run to an hour-by-hour script over a weekend or a period end.", "whyItMatters": "Ask to see a vendor's or partner's actual cutover runbook from a comparable project, including the rollback point, because a plan that has no defined moment where you would abandon and go back is not a plan.", "seeAlso": "data-migration; user-acceptance-testing; implementation-partner; period-close", "modules": "project-management" }, { "slug": "data-governance", "term": "Data governance", "definition": "The rules and roles for data: who owns a field, who may change it, what values are valid, how quality is measured, and how issues are resolved.", "whyItMatters": "Ask what the system enforces — mandatory fields, validation, approval on master-data change — since governance that exists only as policy decays immediately.", "seeAlso": "master-data-management; single-source-of-truth; audit-trail; role-based-access-control", "modules": "ai-features" }, { "slug": "data-lake", "term": "Data lake", "definition": "Storage for large volumes of raw data in its original form, queried where it lies rather than loaded into a fixed schema first. It complements rather than replaces a warehouse.", "whyItMatters": "Ask what the vendor's cloud data offering actually is, since \"lake\" and \"warehouse\" are used loosely in sales material and the difference determines who can query it.", "seeAlso": "data-warehouse; etl; business-intelligence-basics", "modules": "business-intelligence" }, { "slug": "data-migration", "term": "Data migration", "definition": "Moving master data and history out of the old system into the new one — customers, suppliers, items, opening balances, open invoices, and however much transactional history you decide to carry. Almost all of the effort is in cleaning and mapping the data, not in the load itself.", "whyItMatters": "Vendors quote migration as a fixed line item and buyers discover the real cost is their own team's time, so pin down who cleanses the data, how many trial loads are included, and what happens to history you choose to leave behind.", "seeAlso": "cutover; implementation-partner; total-cost-of-ownership; user-acceptance-testing", "modules": "project-management" }, { "slug": "data-residency", "term": "Data residency", "definition": "Where data is physically stored and processed, which some jurisdictions and sectors constrain by law or by contract. It covers backups and the locations from which support staff can reach the data, not only the primary database.", "whyItMatters": "Ask which regions are available, whether backups and support access stay in region, and what a region change involves, since support access is the part usually overlooked.", "seeAlso": "tenant; data-retention; gdpr; soc-2", "modules": "ai-features; localizations" }, { "slug": "data-retention", "term": "Data retention", "definition": "How long records must be kept and in what form, set by tax law, company law and data-protection law, and constrained by what a system can still produce years later.", "whyItMatters": "Ask what happens to retained data at the end of a subscription, because a cloud contract that deletes history on termination collides directly with statutory retention periods.", "seeAlso": "audit-file; data-residency; statutory-filing; audit-trail", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "data-warehouse", "term": "Data warehouse", "definition": "A database organised for analysis rather than transactions, holding cleaned and conformed data from several systems, usually with history retained.", "whyItMatters": "Ask whether the vendor offers one and whether it is the only way to get cross-module reporting, since that answer can add a platform and a team to the plan.", "seeAlso": "data-lake; etl; business-intelligence-basics; single-source-of-truth", "modules": "business-intelligence" }, { "slug": "debit-memo", "term": "Debit memo", "definition": "A document that increases what a counterparty owes — a charge back to a supplier for a short delivery, or an additional charge to a customer outside the normal invoice run. It is the mirror of a credit memo.", "whyItMatters": "Ask how a supplier debit memo nets against the next payment run, since a system that cannot net leaves your AP team maintaining the offset by hand.", "seeAlso": "credit-memo; accounts-payable; payment-run", "modules": "financial-management; procurement" }, { "slug": "deferred-revenue", "term": "Deferred revenue", "definition": "Money you have billed or collected but have not yet earned, held as a liability until you deliver. A twelve-month subscription invoiced up front sits in deferred revenue and is released to the income statement across the term as the service is provided.", "whyItMatters": "If the system cannot hold and release a deferral schedule natively, the balance ends up in a spreadsheet that nobody can reconcile at year end, so check how a mid-term upgrade, a cancellation, or a credit note reshapes an existing schedule.", "seeAlso": "revenue-recognition; accrual; subledger; period-close", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "deficiency", "term": "Control deficiency", "definition": "A control that does not operate as designed, or a design that would not catch the error it targets. Deficiencies are graded by the size of the misstatement they could allow.", "whyItMatters": "Ask what happens to segregation-of-duties conflicts a system cannot avoid because of team size, since compensating controls have to be designed rather than discovered during an audit.", "seeAlso": "material-weakness; internal-control; segregation-of-duties; test-of-effectiveness", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "demand-forecasting", "term": "Demand forecasting", "definition": "Estimating future demand from history, seasonality, pipeline and judgement, at the grain planning needs. The forecast is an input to planning, not a commitment, and its accuracy should be measured.", "whyItMatters": "Ask how forecast accuracy is tracked and whether the system keeps the forecast as it stood at the time, because a forecast that is overwritten cannot be scored and will never improve.", "seeAlso": "material-requirements-planning; safety-stock; capacity-planning", "modules": "supply-chain-management; business-intelligence" }, { "slug": "depreciation", "term": "Depreciation", "definition": "Spreading the cost of a long-lived asset across the periods that benefit from it, rather than expensing it all at purchase. The method and useful life chosen determine the charge each period, and the same asset is frequently depreciated differently for statutory accounts and for tax.", "whyItMatters": "The practical test is whether one asset can carry several parallel books — statutory, tax, and a group reporting standard — and post each to a different ledger, because doing that outside the system is where fixed asset spreadsheets are born.", "seeAlso": "fixed-asset-register; statutory-reporting; general-ledger", "modules": "asset-management; financial-management" }, { "slug": "digital-reporting-requirements", "term": "Digital reporting requirements", "definition": "Obligations to report transaction-level data electronically to an authority on a defined schedule, short of live clearance. Several jurisdictions are moving from periodic returns to this model.", "whyItMatters": "Ask for the vendor's published roadmap by country with dates, because these mandates arrive on legislated deadlines that do not move for an implementation plan.", "seeAlso": "continuous-transaction-controls; e-invoicing-clearance; statutory-filing; localisation", "modules": "localizations" }, { "slug": "dimensions", "term": "Dimensions", "definition": "Coding attached to a posting alongside the account — department, project, location, product line, funding source — so the same transaction can be analysed several ways without inventing new accounts. Vendors call these dimensions, segments, tags, tracking categories or analysis codes, which are broadly the same idea with different limits.", "whyItMatters": "The two limits that bite are how many dimensions a posting can carry and whether they can be added after go-live, so ask both, and ask whether dimensions are enforced on entry or merely available.", "seeAlso": "chart-of-accounts; cost-centre; general-ledger", "modules": "financial-management; business-intelligence; project-management" }, { "slug": "direct-debit", "term": "Direct debit", "definition": "Collecting money by instruction to the payer's bank under a mandate the payer has granted, rather than waiting for them to pay. Common in subscription and utility billing.", "whyItMatters": "Ask how failed collections and mandate expiry are surfaced, because a collection method with no exception handling produces silent revenue loss.", "seeAlso": "sepa; cash-application; dunning; subscription-billing", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "disaster-recovery", "term": "Disaster recovery", "definition": "The plan and capability to restore service after a serious failure, including where the standby capacity is, how failover happens, and how it is tested.", "whyItMatters": "Ask when failover was last actually tested and what the test proved, because a documented plan that has never been exercised is a document, not a capability.", "seeAlso": "recovery-objectives; uptime-sla; data-residency", "modules": "ai-features" }, { "slug": "double-entry-bookkeeping", "term": "Double-entry bookkeeping", "definition": "The convention that every transaction is recorded twice, as a debit in one account and an equal credit in another, so the books always balance. It is the reason a ledger can be proved rather than merely believed.", "whyItMatters": "Ask what the system does when an integration tries to post an unbalanced entry: rejecting it is correct, silently posting the difference to a suspense account is a problem you will find at year end.", "seeAlso": "journal-entry; general-ledger; trial-balance; suspense-account", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "dual-reporting", "term": "Dual reporting", "definition": "Producing figures under two frameworks at once — group and local, or old and new standard — usually by holding a base set of entries plus a layer of framework-specific adjustments.", "whyItMatters": "Ask to see the adjustment layer mechanism, because groups that implement dual reporting as two ledgers spend the next decade reconciling them.", "seeAlso": "local-gaap; ifrs; gaap; statutory-vs-management", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "dunning", "term": "Dunning", "definition": "The scheduled sequence of reminders sent to customers with overdue invoices, escalating in tone and eventually to a stop on further supply or to an external agency. Sequences are usually defined per customer segment.", "whyItMatters": "Ask whether dunning can be paused per invoice for a disputed item without stopping the rest of the customer's sequence, since chasing an invoice a customer has already queried destroys credibility.", "seeAlso": "collections; aging-report; credit-hold; accounts-receivable", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "dynamic-discounting", "term": "Dynamic discounting", "definition": "Offering suppliers a sliding discount for payment ahead of terms, where the discount falls as the due date approaches, letting a buyer deploy surplus cash at a known return.", "whyItMatters": "Ask whether it is native or a partner product, and how the discount is accounted for, because the mechanics are simple and the accounting treatment is where implementations stall.", "seeAlso": "early-payment-discount; supply-chain-finance; working-capital; accounts-payable", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "e-invoicing-clearance", "term": "E-invoicing clearance", "definition": "A model in which an invoice must be submitted to a tax authority's platform and validated before it is legally issued to the buyer, rather than merely reported afterwards. Several countries operate a clearance or pre-clearance regime with their own format, signing and identifier rules; others use post-audit reporting or a network model, and requirements are changing in many jurisdictions.", "whyItMatters": "Whether the vendor supports the specific country's current regime — and updates it as the rules change — is a hard yes or no for anyone invoicing there, and a generic \"we support e-invoicing\" answer in a demo is not one.", "seeAlso": "localisation; statutory-reporting; tax-engine", "modules": "localizations; financial-management" }, { "slug": "e-procurement", "term": "E-procurement", "definition": "Conducting purchasing electronically end to end: catalogues, requisitions, orders, order acknowledgement, receipt and invoice, exchanged as data with suppliers rather than as documents.", "whyItMatters": "Ask how supplier onboarding onto the electronic channel is handled and at whose cost, since the value depends entirely on how many suppliers actually transact this way.", "seeAlso": "punchout; contract-catalogue; edi; procure-to-pay", "modules": "procurement" }, { "slug": "early-payment-discount", "term": "Early payment discount", "definition": "A reduction offered for paying before the due date, such as two per cent within ten days on thirty-day terms. Whether taking it is worthwhile depends on the annualised return against the cost of cash.", "whyItMatters": "Ask whether the payment run evaluates discounts automatically against a threshold, since discounts identified manually are discounts taken inconsistently.", "seeAlso": "dynamic-discounting; payment-run; working-capital; supply-chain-finance", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "ec-sales-list", "term": "EC Sales List", "definition": "The periodic listing of supplies made to value-added-tax-registered customers in other European Union member states, by customer registration number and value.", "whyItMatters": "Ask how the list reconciles to the tax return and to the ledger, because mismatches between the two are a common trigger for an authority's enquiry.", "seeAlso": "intrastat; vat; reverse-charge; tax-identifier-validation", "modules": "localizations; financial-management" }, { "slug": "ecommerce-integration", "term": "Ecommerce integration", "definition": "Connecting a web store to the ledger and to stock: orders and payments in, availability and prices out, with returns and settlement reconciled afterwards.", "whyItMatters": "Ask how payment settlement and fees are reconciled to orders, since gateway settlement is where ecommerce implementations most often leave a manual monthly task.", "seeAlso": "order-to-cash; cash-application; inventory-management-basics; rest-api", "modules": "ecommerce; financial-management" }, { "slug": "edi", "term": "EDI", "definition": "Electronic Data Interchange: the long-established practice of exchanging structured business documents — orders, dispatch advices, invoices — with trading partners in agreed formats such as EDIFACT or X12.", "whyItMatters": "Ask whether EDI is native or a partner add-on and how a new trading partner is mapped, because in retail and automotive supply chains this is a condition of trading, not a nice-to-have.", "seeAlso": "e-procurement; peppol; ipaas; supply-chain-management-basics", "modules": "supply-chain-management; procurement" }, { "slug": "elimination-entry", "term": "Elimination entry", "definition": "A consolidation entry that removes the effect of internal transactions and holdings — intercompany sales, balances, investments in subsidiaries — so the group reports only external activity.", "whyItMatters": "Ask whether eliminations post to a consolidation layer rather than into entity ledgers, because eliminations written into an entity's books corrupt its statutory accounts.", "seeAlso": "intercompany-elimination; intercompany-matching; group-reporting; minority-interest", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "encumbrance", "term": "Encumbrance", "definition": "A reservation of budget for a commitment not yet spent, used heavily in public-sector and grant accounting where unspent budget cannot simply be reallocated.", "whyItMatters": "Ask whether encumbrance accounting is native if you handle grants or public funds, since emulating it with journals is a permanent overhead and a permanent audit topic.", "seeAlso": "commitment-accounting; budget-check; statutory-reporting", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "engineering-change-order", "term": "Engineering change order", "definition": "A controlled change to a product's design — a component substitution, a revised specification — with an effective date, affected orders and cost consequences.", "whyItMatters": "Ask how in-flight work orders and existing stock are handled at the effective date, because that mechanic decides whether engineering changes are absorbed or handled by hand.", "seeAlso": "bill-of-materials; work-order; routing; standard-costing", "modules": "manufacturing-management; quality-management" }, { "slug": "equity-method", "term": "Equity method", "definition": "Accounting for an investment where the group has influence but not control, carrying it at cost plus the group's share of post-acquisition results rather than consolidating the investee line by line.", "whyItMatters": "Ask whether the system supports equity-method holdings alongside full consolidation, since a group with joint ventures otherwise keeps that part of the accounts outside the system.", "seeAlso": "minority-interest; group-reporting; goodwill", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "escrow", "term": "Source code escrow", "definition": "An arrangement depositing software source with a third party, releasable to customers on defined events such as the vendor's insolvency.", "whyItMatters": "Ask what the release conditions and verification arrangements are, because undocumented source nobody can build is of little practical use in the situation it exists for.", "seeAlso": "exit-plan; perpetual-licence; disaster-recovery", "modules": "ai-features" }, { "slug": "esef", "term": "ESEF", "definition": "The European Single Electronic Format: the requirement for listed companies in the European Union to file annual reports in XHTML with the primary statements tagged in inline XBRL.", "whyItMatters": "Ask what part of the process the vendor covers versus a filing agent, since most of this obligation is met with specialist tools rather than inside an ERP.", "seeAlso": "xbrl; statutory-reporting; statutory-filing", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "etl", "term": "ETL", "definition": "Extract, transform, load: moving data out of source systems, reshaping it, and loading it into a target such as a warehouse. In the reverse order it is called ELT.", "whyItMatters": "Ask how the vendor expects reporting data to leave the system and at what frequency, since a nightly extract sets the ceiling on how current any external report can be.", "seeAlso": "data-warehouse; data-lake; middleware; business-intelligence-basics", "modules": "business-intelligence" }, { "slug": "evergreen-upgrade", "term": "Evergreen upgrade", "definition": "The model where the vendor keeps every customer on the current version, applying updates automatically rather than running version-to-version upgrade projects.", "whyItMatters": "Ask what happens to your extensions and integrations at each update and who tests them, since \"no upgrades\" usually means \"continuous regression testing\" instead.", "seeAlso": "release-cadence; regression-testing; extension-model; technical-debt-in-erp", "modules": "ai-features" }, { "slug": "exemption-certificate", "term": "Exemption certificate", "definition": "Documentation from a customer establishing that a sale is not taxable — resale, non-profit status, a specific use — which the seller must hold and be able to produce.", "whyItMatters": "Ask how certificates are stored, linked to customers and expired, because an untaxed sale with no valid certificate becomes the seller's liability on audit.", "seeAlso": "sales-and-use-tax; tax-determination; customer-master; audit-evidence", "modules": "financial-management; localizations" }, { "slug": "exit-plan", "term": "Exit plan", "definition": "The agreed arrangements for leaving a service: data extract format and timing, retention during transition, assistance rates, and deletion certification.", "whyItMatters": "Ask for a sample extract of your own data during selection, since a format nobody can load is functionally the same as having no exit.", "seeAlso": "termination-for-convenience; data-retention; data-migration; escrow", "modules": "ai-features" }, { "slug": "expansion-revenue", "term": "Expansion revenue", "definition": "Additional recurring revenue from existing customers: more users, higher tiers, extra products. It is usually the cheapest revenue a subscription business can acquire.", "whyItMatters": "Ask whether expansion is identifiable in reporting as a contract event rather than inferred from period-end totals, because inference cannot be reconciled to anything.", "seeAlso": "churn; renewal; monthly-recurring-revenue; proration", "modules": "crm; financial-management" }, { "slug": "expense-report", "term": "Expense report", "definition": "An employee's claim for costs incurred on the company's behalf, with receipts, policy checks, approval and reimbursement, plus tax treatment of the recoverable elements.", "whyItMatters": "Ask how policy is enforced at submission and how the recoverable tax is captured, since manual tax coding on expenses is both an irrecoverable cost and an audit finding.", "seeAlso": "virtual-card; timesheet; vat; approval-workflow", "modules": "hr-payroll; financial-management" }, { "slug": "extension-model", "term": "Extension model", "definition": "How a system is customised without altering its core: configuration, low-code extensions, published extension points, or an application platform alongside it.", "whyItMatters": "Ask what happens to extensions at an update and whether the vendor tests them, because the extension model determines whether your customisations are an asset or a liability.", "seeAlso": "evergreen-upgrade; technical-debt-in-erp; release-cadence; fit-gap-analysis", "modules": "ai-features" }, { "slug": "external-audit", "term": "External audit", "definition": "The independent examination of financial statements resulting in an opinion on whether they are fairly stated. It tests balances, controls, and the systems the numbers come from.", "whyItMatters": "Ask whether your intended auditor has seen this system before, because an auditor unfamiliar with a platform charges for the learning and asks for more manual evidence.", "seeAlso": "pbc-list; audit-evidence; management-letter; materiality", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "field-service-management", "term": "Field service management", "definition": "Scheduling and equipping engineers to work at customer sites: work orders, skills and parts, travel, time capture, and billing or warranty recovery afterwards.", "whyItMatters": "Ask how van stock is valued and reconciled, since inventory sitting in vehicles is routinely the least accurate stock a company holds.", "seeAlso": "serial-number-tracking; warranty-management; preventive-maintenance; inventory-management-basics", "modules": "field-service; inventory-management" }, { "slug": "fiscal-calendar", "term": "Fiscal calendar", "definition": "How a company divides its year for reporting: twelve calendar months, thirteen four-week periods, or a 4-4-5 pattern, with a year end that may not be December. Every period-based report depends on it.", "whyItMatters": "Ask whether the system supports your pattern natively and whether different entities in the group can run different calendars, because a mismatch here breaks consolidation rather than inconveniencing it.", "seeAlso": "fiscal-year; period-close; period-lock; group-reporting", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "fiscal-representative", "term": "Fiscal representative", "definition": "A local agent appointed to handle a foreign company's tax obligations in a jurisdiction that requires one, often jointly liable for the tax.", "whyItMatters": "Ask what data a representative typically needs and whether the system can produce it per registration, since representatives charge by the effort your data creates for them.", "seeAlso": "statutory-filing; vat; localisation; tax-jurisdiction", "modules": "localizations" }, { "slug": "fiscal-year", "term": "Fiscal year", "definition": "The twelve-month reporting period a company uses for its statutory accounts, which may run to any month end. Tax years and fiscal years do not always coincide.", "whyItMatters": "Ask what a fiscal-year change or a short accounting period involves, since acquisitions routinely require aligning an acquired entity's year to the group's.", "seeAlso": "fiscal-calendar; year-end-close; statutory-reporting", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "fit-gap-analysis", "term": "Fit-gap analysis", "definition": "Comparing requirements against what the system does as delivered, and deciding for each gap whether to change the process, configure, extend, or accept it.", "whyItMatters": "Ask for the gap list with a decision against every line before contracting, because gaps discovered after signature are change orders rather than negotiating points.", "seeAlso": "requirements-traceability; conference-room-pilot; extension-model; change-order", "modules": "project-management" }, { "slug": "fixed-asset-register", "term": "Fixed asset register", "definition": "The detailed record of every capitalised asset — cost, acquisition date, useful life, accumulated depreciation, location and disposal — that supports the single asset figure on the balance sheet. It is a subledger, and it should reconcile to the ledger every period without manual adjustment.", "whyItMatters": "Ask how mid-life events are handled — impairment, a revised useful life, a partial disposal, a transfer between entities — because that is where a thin register forces the team back into a spreadsheet.", "seeAlso": "depreciation; subledger; capital-expenditure", "modules": "asset-management; financial-management" }, { "slug": "fixed-price-contract", "term": "Fixed-price contract", "definition": "A contract for an agreed scope at an agreed price, where the supplier carries the risk of the effort required. Change control is what keeps it viable.", "whyItMatters": "Ask how change orders are raised, priced and linked to the original contract, since fixed-price work without disciplined change control is where implementation partners lose money and clients lose trust.", "seeAlso": "time-and-materials; change-order; percentage-of-completion; milestone-billing", "modules": "project-management" }, { "slug": "flux-analysis", "term": "Flux analysis", "definition": "A review of period-on-period movements in every material account, used in the close and by auditors to spot balances that moved when they should not have, or did not move when they should.", "whyItMatters": "Ask for a standard report of movements with thresholds and stored explanations, because a flux review rebuilt in a spreadsheet each month is the first thing dropped when the close is late.", "seeAlso": "variance-analysis; balance-sheet-substantiation; materiality; period-close", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "freight-cost-allocation", "term": "Freight cost allocation", "definition": "Spreading a shipment's transport cost across the items in it, by value, weight or volume, so each item carries a fair share of the cost of getting it there.", "whyItMatters": "Ask which allocation bases are supported and whether a late freight invoice can be applied retrospectively, because manual freight allocation is a recurring close task nobody enjoys.", "seeAlso": "landed-cost; inventory-valuation; allocation; customs-duty", "modules": "supply-chain-management; inventory-management" }, { "slug": "functional-currency", "term": "Functional currency", "definition": "The currency of the primary economic environment in which an entity operates, and therefore the currency it keeps its books in. It is a determination, not a preference, and changing it is a significant event.", "whyItMatters": "Ask whether the system can hold transactional, functional and group currencies on every posting, since a two-currency ledger will not survive the first overseas subsidiary.", "seeAlso": "presentation-currency; currency-translation; fx-revaluation; legal-entity", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "fx-gain-loss", "term": "FX gain or loss", "definition": "The profit effect of exchange-rate movement: realised when a foreign-currency item settles at a different rate than it was booked, unrealised when it is revalued while still open.", "whyItMatters": "Ask whether realised and unrealised effects are posted to separate accounts, because a single combined account makes the treasury discussion about hedging impossible to have.", "seeAlso": "fx-revaluation; currency-translation; treasury-management", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "fx-revaluation", "term": "FX revaluation", "definition": "Restating monetary balances held in a foreign currency at the period-end rate, so receivables, payables and cash reflect current value, with the movement recognised in profit as an unrealised gain or loss.", "whyItMatters": "Ask which accounts are revalued and whether the run can be reversed and repeated after a rate correction, since a wrong rate loaded once will otherwise persist through the close.", "seeAlso": "fx-gain-loss; currency-translation; functional-currency; period-close", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "gaap", "term": "GAAP", "definition": "Generally accepted accounting principles: the framework of rules and conventions financial statements are prepared under in a given country, of which the United States version is the most cited.", "whyItMatters": "Ask which frameworks a system supports simultaneously per entity, since a group reporting under one framework locally and another to the parent needs both from one set of transactions.", "seeAlso": "ifrs; local-gaap; dual-reporting; statutory-reporting", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "gdpr", "term": "GDPR", "definition": "The European Union's data-protection regulation, governing lawful basis, individual rights, retention and transfers of personal data, with obligations on both controller and processor.", "whyItMatters": "Ask how deletion and access requests are handled in a system whose whole point is retaining records, because the tension between these obligations and statutory retention is real and needs a documented answer.", "seeAlso": "data-residency; data-retention; audit-trail", "modules": "ai-features" }, { "slug": "general-ledger", "term": "General ledger", "definition": "The central record of every posting, organised by account, from which the trial balance and the financial statements are produced. Everything the business does in other modules eventually arrives here, usually summarised, and the ledger is the thing the auditors read.", "whyItMatters": "The questions worth asking are how far you can drill from a ledger balance back to a source document, and how quickly a posted entry becomes visible in reporting, because a ledger you cannot trace out of is a reconciliation problem for years.", "seeAlso": "subledger; chart-of-accounts; trial-balance; journal-entry", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "goods-receipt", "term": "Goods receipt", "definition": "The record that ordered goods or services actually arrived, entered by whoever received them, against the purchase order that ordered them. It creates the liability for what has been received but not yet invoiced, and it is the second leg of three-way matching.", "whyItMatters": "If receiving is awkward — no mobile capture, no partial receipts, no way to record a short delivery — people stop doing it, and the matching control that the whole procure-to-pay design rests on quietly stops working.", "seeAlso": "purchase-order; three-way-matching; accrual", "modules": "procurement; warehouse-management; inventory-management" }, { "slug": "goods-received-not-invoiced", "term": "Goods received not invoiced", "definition": "The liability for stock or services received where the supplier invoice has not yet arrived, held in a clearing account and derived from receipts against purchase orders. It is the automated form of a purchase accrual.", "whyItMatters": "Ask whether the balance is generated from receipts automatically and aged, because a team that rebuilds this from a spreadsheet at each close is doing the system's work for it.", "seeAlso": "clearing-account; goods-receipt; accrual; three-way-matching", "modules": "financial-management; procurement" }, { "slug": "goodwill", "term": "Goodwill", "definition": "The excess of what was paid for a business over the fair value of its identifiable net assets, recognised on acquisition and then tested for impairment rather than amortised under most frameworks.", "whyItMatters": "Ask how acquisition accounting and impairment testing are supported, because groups that acquire regularly need this in the system rather than in a partner's spreadsheet.", "seeAlso": "purchase-accounting; equity-method; impairment; amortisation", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "gross-to-net", "term": "Gross to net", "definition": "The calculation from contractual gross pay to the amount an employee receives, applying tax, social contributions, pensions and other deductions in the order each jurisdiction requires.", "whyItMatters": "Ask whether the calculation is maintained by the vendor for each country you operate in, since payroll rules change annually and a self-maintained engine is a permanent liability.", "seeAlso": "payroll-run; statutory-filing; payroll-journal", "modules": "hr-payroll; localizations" }, { "slug": "group-reporting", "term": "Group reporting", "definition": "Producing consolidated statements for a set of entities: collecting their trial balances, translating currencies, eliminating internal activity, recognising minority interests, and reporting the result.", "whyItMatters": "Ask whether consolidation happens inside the ERP or in a separate tool, and how acquisitions mid-year are handled, since these two answers determine whether your close is one process or two.", "seeAlso": "multi-entity-consolidation; elimination-entry; currency-translation; minority-interest", "modules": "financial-management; business-intelligence" }, { "slug": "gst", "term": "GST", "definition": "Goods and services tax: the same mechanism as value-added tax under a different name, used in Canada, Australia, India, Singapore and elsewhere, each with its own structure and returns.", "whyItMatters": "Ask specifically about Indian GST if you trade there, since its place-of-supply and state-level structure is materially more complex than most vendors' generic support implies.", "seeAlso": "vat; tax-determination; statutory-filing; localisation", "modules": "localizations; financial-management" }, { "slug": "hard-close", "term": "Hard close", "definition": "A full close with every reconciliation, accrual, allocation and review completed and the period locked, producing numbers fit for statutory reporting and audit.", "whyItMatters": "Ask how the period lock works per module and per entity, because a lock that can be lifted by a single administrator without a trace is not a control.", "seeAlso": "soft-close; period-lock; period-close; statutory-reporting", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "headcount-planning", "term": "Headcount planning", "definition": "Planning roles, start dates and fully loaded costs, and reconciling the plan to actual hires and to the payroll cost that follows. It is usually the largest line in an operating plan.", "whyItMatters": "Ask whether the plan is held at role level with cost derived from a rate table, because a headcount plan typed as monetary amounts cannot be re-costed when salaries change.", "seeAlso": "payroll-run; budget-check; cost-centre; management-reporting", "modules": "hr-payroll; business-intelligence" }, { "slug": "hedge-accounting", "term": "Hedge accounting", "definition": "The elective treatment that lets the gain or loss on a hedging instrument be recognised in the same period as the exposure it hedges, subject to documentation and effectiveness testing.", "whyItMatters": "Ask whether hedge documentation and effectiveness testing are supported, because the accounting relief depends entirely on paperwork prepared before the hedge is entered.", "seeAlso": "treasury-management; fx-gain-loss; fx-revaluation", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "hypercare", "term": "Hypercare", "definition": "The intensive support period immediately after go-live, with elevated staffing and response times, ending on agreed exit criteria rather than on a date alone.", "whyItMatters": "Ask what the exit criteria are and what support costs afterwards, since a hypercare period that ends by calendar leaves open defects to become business-as-usual tickets.", "seeAlso": "cutover; managed-services; uptime-sla; acceptance-criteria", "modules": "project-management" }, { "slug": "ifrs", "term": "IFRS", "definition": "International Financial Reporting Standards, used for consolidated reporting in more than a hundred jurisdictions and mandatory for listed companies in the European Union and much of Asia.", "whyItMatters": "Ask how the system handles the areas where frameworks differ most — leases, revenue and financial instruments — because those are where a dual-reporting requirement becomes real work.", "seeAlso": "gaap; local-gaap; dual-reporting; lease-accounting", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "impairment", "term": "Impairment", "definition": "Writing an asset down when its recoverable amount falls below its carrying value — a plant no longer used, goodwill from an underperforming acquisition, a capitalised project abandoned.", "whyItMatters": "Ask whether impairment can be posted in the asset register with the revised schedule flowing automatically, because a manual adjustment leaves the register and the ledger disagreeing.", "seeAlso": "goodwill; fixed-asset-register; depreciation; write-off", "modules": "financial-management; asset-management" }, { "slug": "implementation-multiple", "term": "Implementation multiple", "definition": "Implementation services cost expressed as a multiple of first-year software cost, the shorthand buyers use to sanity-check a proposal. Multiples vary by complexity and by tier.", "whyItMatters": "Ask a vendor for the range across its recent comparable projects rather than a single figure, and treat a quote far below the range as a scope question rather than a bargain.", "seeAlso": "total-cost-of-ownership; run-cost; statement-of-work; change-request-rate", "modules": "project-management" }, { "slug": "implementation-partner", "term": "Implementation partner", "definition": "The consultancy that configures the system, migrates the data and trains the users — often a different company from the one that sells the licence. Vendor directories rank partners by tier, which reflects certifications and sales volume rather than the quality of any particular team.", "whyItMatters": "The named consultants matter more than the firm's tier, so ask who specifically will be on your project, what else they are staffed on during your timeline, and what the change process is when they want to swap someone out.", "seeAlso": "data-migration; cutover; total-cost-of-ownership; user-acceptance-testing", "modules": "project-management" }, { "slug": "income-statement", "term": "Income statement", "definition": "The statement of revenue, cost and resulting profit over a period, also called the profit and loss account. It is the report most managers outside finance actually read, usually against budget and against the same period last year.", "whyItMatters": "Ask how many dimensions the statement can be sliced by at once — entity, cost centre, product, project — without exporting to a spreadsheet, since that ceiling becomes your reporting ceiling.", "seeAlso": "balance-sheet; variance-analysis; cost-centre; dimensions; management-reporting", "modules": "financial-management; business-intelligence" }, { "slug": "indirect-access", "term": "Indirect access", "definition": "Use of licensed software through another system rather than by a person at a screen — an integration reading data, a portal that queries the ledger. Some vendors licence it separately.", "whyItMatters": "Ask in writing how integrations and customer-facing portals are licensed, because this is historically the most expensive surprise in enterprise software contracts.", "seeAlso": "licence-audit; named-user-licence; rest-api; true-up", "modules": "ai-features" }, { "slug": "intercompany-elimination", "term": "Intercompany elimination", "definition": "Removing transactions between entities of the same group so the consolidated accounts show only dealings with the outside world. A sale from one subsidiary to another is real for each entity's own books but is not group revenue, and any profit still sitting in unsold stock has to come out too.", "whyItMatters": "Ask whether the system matches and eliminates intercompany balances itself or hands you a report to work from, because unmatched intercompany differences are one of the most reliable ways to lose days at a group close.", "seeAlso": "multi-entity-consolidation; legal-entity; period-close", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "intercompany-matching", "term": "Intercompany matching", "definition": "Agreeing balances and transactions between entities of the same group before consolidation, so that what one entity records as owed matches what the other records as due.", "whyItMatters": "Ask whether the system matches intercompany automatically and reports differences by pair and by age, since manual intercompany agreement is the single most common cause of a late group close.", "seeAlso": "intercompany-elimination; elimination-entry; group-reporting; multi-entity-consolidation", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "internal-control", "term": "Internal control", "definition": "A process designed to prevent or detect error and fraud: an approval limit, a reconciliation, a system-enforced separation of duties, a review. Controls are described, performed, and evidenced.", "whyItMatters": "Ask which controls the system enforces rather than merely records, because a control that depends on someone remembering is a control an auditor will test and find failing.", "seeAlso": "segregation-of-duties; key-control; control-owner; sox-controls", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "intrastat", "term": "Intrastat", "definition": "The statistical declaration of goods moving between European Union member states, filed by businesses above thresholds and derived from dispatch and arrival data with commodity codes and values.", "whyItMatters": "Ask whether declarations are generated from shipment data with commodity codes on the item master, since compiling them by hand each month is a task that never ends.", "seeAlso": "ec-sales-list; customs-duty; statutory-filing; localisation", "modules": "localizations; supply-chain-management" }, { "slug": "inventory-management-basics", "term": "Inventory management", "definition": "Knowing what stock exists, where it sits, what it cost and what it is committed to. It spans item master data, locations and lots, valuation, and the transactions that move quantities between states.", "whyItMatters": "Ask how the system handles lots, serials and expiry if your product needs them, since retrofitting traceability after go-live means re-implementing the area rather than configuring it.", "seeAlso": "inventory-valuation; stock-take; safety-stock; warehouse-management-system", "modules": "inventory-management" }, { "slug": "inventory-turnover", "term": "Inventory turnover", "definition": "How many times stock is sold and replaced over a period, computed as cost of goods sold divided by average inventory. Low turnover means cash sitting on shelves; very high turnover can mean stock-outs.", "whyItMatters": "Ask at what grain the system reports it — by site, by product family, by ABC class — since a company-level number hides exactly the slow-moving lines a buyer needs to find.", "seeAlso": "working-capital; inventory-valuation; stock-take", "modules": "inventory-management; business-intelligence" }, { "slug": "inventory-valuation", "term": "Inventory valuation", "definition": "The method that puts a cost on stock on hand and on goods sold: standard cost, weighted average, first-in-first-out, or specific identification. The choice changes reported margin and is constrained by the accounting framework in each country.", "whyItMatters": "Ask which methods the system supports per legal entity and whether it can hold a different one for statutory and for management reporting, because a group operating in several regimes will need both.", "seeAlso": "inventory-turnover; standard-costing; statutory-reporting; local-gaap", "modules": "inventory-management; manufacturing-management" }, { "slug": "ipaas", "term": "iPaaS", "definition": "Integration platform as a service: hosted tooling for connecting applications with pre-built connectors, mapping, scheduling and monitoring, instead of bespoke point-to-point code.", "whyItMatters": "Ask who owns the integration platform in the proposed architecture and its licence cost, because it is frequently omitted from the business case and then required on day one.", "seeAlso": "middleware; rest-api; webhook; etl", "modules": "ai-features" }, { "slug": "iso-27001", "term": "ISO/IEC 27001", "definition": "The international standard for an information-security management system, certifying that a documented, risk-based programme exists and is being followed.", "whyItMatters": "Ask for the certificate's scope statement, because certification can cover a subsidiary or a data centre rather than the service you are actually buying.", "seeAlso": "soc-2; penetration-test; data-residency", "modules": "ai-features" }, { "slug": "journal-entry", "term": "Journal entry", "definition": "A posting to the ledger, with debits equal to credits, that records something the transactional modules did not already record — an accrual, a reclassification, a correction, an allocation. Manual journals are the finance team's own instrument, which is exactly why they are watched closely.", "whyItMatters": "Look at how journals are controlled rather than how they are entered: whether approval can be required above a threshold, whether the preparer can approve their own, and whether a template or recurring journal still goes through the same review.", "seeAlso": "general-ledger; audit-trail; segregation-of-duties; accrual", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "journal-template", "term": "Journal template", "definition": "A saved structure for a journal — accounts, dimensions, descriptions, sometimes amounts or formulas — used to standardise entries that recur or that several people prepare.", "whyItMatters": "Ask whether templates enforce required dimensions, since a template that allows a blank cost centre will quietly produce unanalysable postings for years.", "seeAlso": "recurring-journal; journal-entry; dimensions", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "key-control", "term": "Key control", "definition": "A control relied upon to address a specific risk of material misstatement, and therefore tested by auditors. Not every control is key; identifying which are keeps testing proportionate.", "whyItMatters": "Ask whether the system can produce the evidence a key control needs on demand — approvals, exceptions, who did what and when — since evidence gathered by screenshot does not scale.", "seeAlso": "internal-control; sox-controls; test-of-effectiveness; audit-evidence", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "landed-cost", "term": "Landed cost", "definition": "The full cost of getting goods to their destination: purchase price plus freight, duty, insurance, handling and any other charge, applied to inventory value rather than expensed separately.", "whyItMatters": "Ask how estimated landed cost is applied at receipt and reconciled to the actual charges when they arrive weeks later, because that gap is where reported margin quietly goes wrong.", "seeAlso": "inventory-valuation; customs-duty; goods-receipt; freight-cost-allocation", "modules": "inventory-management; supply-chain-management" }, { "slug": "lease-accounting", "term": "Lease accounting", "definition": "Recognising leases on the balance sheet as a right-of-use asset and a lease liability, unwinding both over the term, with remeasurement when terms change.", "whyItMatters": "Ask whether lease schedules live in the system or in a spreadsheet, since leases are numerous, change often, and remeasurement by hand is where errors accumulate.", "seeAlso": "ifrs; gaap; fixed-asset-register; amortisation", "modules": "financial-management; asset-management" }, { "slug": "legal-entity", "term": "Legal entity", "definition": "A company that exists in law, files its own statutory accounts and tax returns, and holds its own set of books. A group is a collection of them, and the reporting structure the business talks about day to day often cuts across the legal one.", "whyItMatters": "Adding entities is a routine event for a growing business, so ask what a new entity costs — in licence, in configuration, in whether it can share a chart of accounts — before the answer becomes a surprise during an acquisition.", "seeAlso": "multi-entity-consolidation; intercompany-elimination; statutory-reporting; cost-centre", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "licence-audit", "term": "Licence audit", "definition": "A vendor's formal review of whether a customer's use matches its entitlement, with remediation at list price where it does not.", "whyItMatters": "Ask what audit rights the contract grants and what notice you get, since these clauses are rarely negotiated at signature and are expensive when exercised.", "seeAlso": "true-up; indirect-access; named-user-licence", "modules": "ai-features" }, { "slug": "local-gaap", "term": "Local GAAP", "definition": "A country's own accounting framework, which may differ from the group's on depreciation, provisions, revenue and presentation. Statutory accounts must follow it even when the group reports otherwise.", "whyItMatters": "Ask whether local adjustments are held as a separate layer over the same transactions, since maintaining two full ledgers per entity doubles the close and the risk.", "seeAlso": "gaap; ifrs; dual-reporting; statutory-chart-of-accounts", "modules": "localizations; financial-management" }, { "slug": "localisation", "term": "Localisation", "definition": "The country-specific behaviour a system needs to be usable in a jurisdiction: statutory chart requirements, tax calculation and filing formats, invoice layout and numbering rules, payroll and payment file formats, language, and whatever the local authority mandates electronically. It is supplied by the vendor in some countries and by a partner or third-party add-on in others.", "whyItMatters": "Ask specifically who builds and maintains the localisation for each country you operate in, and how quickly a regulatory change has historically reached customers, because a partner-built localisation ties you to that partner far more tightly than the software does.", "seeAlso": "e-invoicing-clearance; statutory-reporting; tax-engine; implementation-partner", "modules": "localizations; hr-payroll; financial-management" }, { "slug": "lockbox", "term": "Lockbox", "definition": "A bank service that receives customer payments on a company's behalf and returns a structured file of the payments and their remittance detail for automatic application. It is common in the United States and rare elsewhere.", "whyItMatters": "Ask which lockbox file formats the system reads natively if you use one, because a bespoke parser is a small integration that quietly becomes yours to maintain forever.", "seeAlso": "cash-application; remittance-advice; bank-reconciliation", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "making-tax-digital", "term": "Making Tax Digital", "definition": "The United Kingdom regime requiring value-added tax records to be kept digitally and returns to be filed through software with a digital link from the underlying records.", "whyItMatters": "Ask whether the vendor is listed as compatible software and how spreadsheet adjustments are digitally linked, because a manual re-key breaks the digital-link requirement.", "seeAlso": "vat; statutory-filing; digital-reporting-requirements; localisation", "modules": "localizations; financial-management" }, { "slug": "managed-services", "term": "Managed services", "definition": "Ongoing operation, support and small-change delivery by a third party after go-live, priced by subscription, ticket volume or a retained capacity of days.", "whyItMatters": "Ask how small changes are prioritised and charged, because a managed-service contract with no change capacity turns every improvement into a project.", "seeAlso": "hypercare; implementation-partner; change-request-rate; uptime-sla", "modules": "project-management" }, { "slug": "management-letter", "term": "Management letter", "definition": "The auditor's written observations to management on control and process weaknesses found during an audit that fall short of a formal reporting matter, with recommendations.", "whyItMatters": "Ask a reference customer what its first management letter after go-live said, since those letters are the most candid available account of how an implementation actually landed.", "seeAlso": "external-audit; deficiency; internal-control", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "management-reporting", "term": "Management reporting", "definition": "Reporting produced for internal decisions rather than for statute: profit by product, by customer, by project, against budget, at whatever grain management works at. It is where dimensions earn their keep.", "whyItMatters": "Ask to see a management pack built from your own account and dimension structure, since the gap between statutory competence and management flexibility is where most dissatisfaction after go-live sits.", "seeAlso": "statutory-vs-management; dimensions; variance-analysis; income-statement", "modules": "financial-management; business-intelligence" }, { "slug": "master-data-management", "term": "Master data management", "definition": "The governance and tooling that keeps shared records — customers, suppliers, items, accounts — consistent across systems, with ownership, validation and a survivorship rule for conflicts.", "whyItMatters": "Ask which system will own each master record and where duplicates are resolved, since an ERP programme that leaves this undecided discovers it during data migration at the worst moment.", "seeAlso": "single-source-of-truth; data-governance; customer-master; supplier-master; data-migration", "modules": "ai-features" }, { "slug": "material-requirements-planning", "term": "Material requirements planning", "definition": "The calculation that turns demand, stock on hand, open orders and lead times into what to buy and make, and when. It runs on the bill of materials and is the engine behind most purchase suggestions in an ERP.", "whyItMatters": "Ask how long a full planning run takes on data your size and whether it can run more than nightly, since planners who cannot re-run after a change go back to working from a spreadsheet.", "seeAlso": "capacity-planning; bill-of-materials; safety-stock; demand-forecasting", "modules": "manufacturing-management; supply-chain-management" }, { "slug": "material-weakness", "term": "Material weakness", "definition": "A deficiency, or combination of them, severe enough that a material misstatement could go undetected. For a listed company it is a disclosable event with consequences beyond the finance team.", "whyItMatters": "Ask a reference customer whether the implementation caused any control findings in its first audited year, because that question surfaces problems no feature list will.", "seeAlso": "deficiency; sox-controls; external-audit; internal-control", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "materiality", "term": "Materiality", "definition": "The threshold above which an error or omission would change a reader's decision, set in judgement and used to scope both close work and audit work. Below it, precision is not worth its cost.", "whyItMatters": "Ask whether thresholds can be configured to drive reconciliation and review requirements, since a close that treats every account identically spends its effort in the wrong places.", "seeAlso": "flux-analysis; balance-sheet-substantiation; external-audit; internal-control", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "maverick-spend", "term": "Maverick spend", "definition": "Buying that bypasses agreed suppliers, catalogues or approval routes — the invoice that arrives with no purchase order behind it. It costs more per unit and is invisible until it is paid.", "whyItMatters": "Ask what proportion of invoices today have no purchase order, since that single figure predicts how much of the promised procurement benefit is actually reachable.", "seeAlso": "spend-under-management; non-po-invoice; procure-to-pay; contract-catalogue", "modules": "procurement" }, { "slug": "middleware", "term": "Middleware", "definition": "Software sitting between applications to move, transform and route data between them, whether a message broker, an integration bus or a hosted platform.", "whyItMatters": "Ask where transformation logic will live, since business rules buried in middleware are invisible to both finance and the ERP team and are the hardest thing to hand over.", "seeAlso": "ipaas; etl; rest-api", "modules": "ai-features" }, { "slug": "milestone-billing", "term": "Milestone billing", "definition": "Invoicing on the achievement of defined contract milestones rather than on time elapsed or cost incurred. Billing and revenue recognition may follow entirely different patterns.", "whyItMatters": "Ask whether billing milestones and revenue recognition are configured separately, since a system that ties them together will misstate one of them on every fixed-price contract.", "seeAlso": "percentage-of-completion; fixed-price-contract; revenue-schedule; retainage", "modules": "project-management; financial-management" }, { "slug": "minority-interest", "term": "Minority interest", "definition": "The share of a subsidiary's equity and results belonging to owners outside the group, shown separately in consolidated statements. Also called non-controlling interest.", "whyItMatters": "Ask how ownership percentages and changes in them are held, because a group that models partial ownership by hand will restate its consolidation every time a stake moves.", "seeAlso": "group-reporting; elimination-entry; equity-method; multi-entity-consolidation", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "module-based-licensing", "term": "Module-based licensing", "definition": "Charging by the functional modules enabled, sometimes combined with user counts, so scope growth changes the price independently of headcount.", "whyItMatters": "Ask which modules the demonstrated process actually required, because demonstrations routinely span modules that are not in the quoted price.", "seeAlso": "named-user-licence; consumption-pricing; subscription-licensing; true-up", "modules": "ai-features" }, { "slug": "monthly-recurring-revenue", "term": "Monthly recurring revenue", "definition": "The same contract measure expressed per month, used where contracts and changes to them are frequent. Movements are usually decomposed into new, expansion, contraction and churn.", "whyItMatters": "Ask whether the system can produce that movement analysis from contract events rather than from period-end snapshots, because the decomposition is the part investors ask about.", "seeAlso": "annual-recurring-revenue; churn; expansion-revenue; subscription-billing", "modules": "financial-management; crm" }, { "slug": "multi-entity-consolidation", "term": "Multi-entity consolidation", "definition": "Combining the accounts of several entities into one set of group figures — translating foreign currencies, eliminating internal transactions, and accounting for the share of subsidiaries the group does not own. The mechanics differ under IFRS and various national frameworks, so the reporting standard a group applies shapes what its system has to do.", "whyItMatters": "The demo question is whether consolidation runs inside the system on live data or is a separate tool fed by exports, and how a mid-year acquisition or a change in ownership percentage is handled.", "seeAlso": "intercompany-elimination; legal-entity; statutory-reporting; period-close", "modules": "financial-management; business-intelligence" }, { "slug": "multi-tenant", "term": "Multi-tenant", "definition": "An architecture in which all customers run the same version of the application, with their data separated logically, and everyone is upgraded together on the vendor's schedule. The alternative — a single-tenant or hosted instance per customer — allows deeper modification and version control at the cost of doing your own upgrades.", "whyItMatters": "This decides whether upgrades are something that happens to you or something you plan, so establish what notice you get, whether you can defer a release, and what happens to your customisations and integrations when one lands.", "seeAlso": "subscription-licensing; total-cost-of-ownership; two-tier-erp", "modules": "ai-features; business-intelligence" }, { "slug": "multi-year-commitment", "term": "Multi-year commitment", "definition": "Agreeing a term of several years in exchange for discount or price protection, often with a payment schedule and a ramp in committed volumes.", "whyItMatters": "Ask what happens if your requirement shrinks, because commitment discounts are priced against a growth assumption that no contract obliges the vendor to share.", "seeAlso": "ramp-deal; price-uplift-cap; termination-for-convenience; shelfware", "modules": "ai-features" }, { "slug": "named-user-licence", "term": "Named user licence", "definition": "Licensing by individual identified user, whether or not they are all using the system at once. Types are usually tiered by what the user can do.", "whyItMatters": "Ask how occasional users are licensed, because a model that charges a full user for someone who approves two invoices a month distorts the whole business case.", "seeAlso": "concurrent-user-licence; module-based-licensing; true-up; shelfware", "modules": "ai-features" }, { "slug": "nexus", "term": "Nexus", "definition": "The connection between a business and a United States jurisdiction that creates an obligation to register and collect tax there, arising from physical presence or from economic activity above a threshold.", "whyItMatters": "Ask whether the system tracks economic-nexus thresholds by state against actual sales, since crossing one unnoticed creates a liability that compounds quietly.", "seeAlso": "sales-and-use-tax; tax-determination; statutory-filing", "modules": "financial-management; localizations" }, { "slug": "non-conformance", "term": "Non-conformance", "definition": "A recorded instance of something failing to meet specification — an incoming batch, a produced item, a process step — with disposition, root cause and corrective action.", "whyItMatters": "Ask whether non-conformances link to the batch, the supplier and the corrective action in one record, since quality data spread across systems cannot support a recall.", "seeAlso": "corrective-action; batch-traceability; quality-inspection; engineering-change-order", "modules": "quality-management" }, { "slug": "non-po-invoice", "term": "Non-PO invoice", "definition": "A supplier invoice with no purchase order to match against, so it must be coded and approved on its own. Utilities, professional fees and rent are legitimately non-PO; much else is not.", "whyItMatters": "Ask how these are routed and coded, because they are the highest-effort and highest-risk invoices in payables and their share rarely falls without deliberate work.", "seeAlso": "maverick-spend; three-way-matching; approval-workflow; accounts-payable", "modules": "procurement; financial-management" }, { "slug": "opening-balance", "term": "Opening balance", "definition": "The balance an account starts a period or a system's life with. In an implementation, opening balances are loaded at cutover and are the first thing an auditor tests.", "whyItMatters": "Ask how opening balances are loaded, proved and re-loaded if wrong, because a cutover that cannot be repeated is a cutover you will be forced to accept with errors in it.", "seeAlso": "cutover; data-migration; trial-balance; year-end-close", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "order-to-cash", "term": "Order to cash", "definition": "The end-to-end process from taking a customer order to collecting the money: order entry, credit check, fulfilment, invoicing, cash application and collections. It crosses sales, operations and finance.", "whyItMatters": "Ask to see one order run all the way to cash in a single demonstration, because vendors usually show the steps separately and the handovers are where the process actually breaks.", "seeAlso": "procure-to-pay; accounts-receivable; credit-limit; cash-application", "modules": "financial-management; crm" }, { "slug": "parallel-run", "term": "Parallel run", "definition": "Operating the old and new systems together for a period and comparing their output, most common for payroll where a wrong answer has immediate consequences.", "whyItMatters": "Ask whether a parallel run is planned, for how many cycles, and who does the double entry, because a parallel run nobody resourced becomes a parallel run nobody performs.", "seeAlso": "cutover; system-integration-testing; payroll-run; user-acceptance-testing", "modules": "project-management" }, { "slug": "payment-file", "term": "Payment file", "definition": "The structured instruction sent to a bank to make payments, in a format the bank accepts, such as an ISO 20022 message or a national scheme format. Format details vary by bank and country.", "whyItMatters": "Ask which formats ship as standard for your banks and countries and who maintains them when a bank changes its specification, since bespoke formats are a recurring cost with no visible owner.", "seeAlso": "payment-run; sepa; ach; bank-connectivity", "modules": "financial-management; localizations" }, { "slug": "payment-run", "term": "Payment run", "definition": "The batch process that selects due invoices, applies payment terms and discounts, groups by supplier and method, produces the payment file, and posts the ledger entries.", "whyItMatters": "Ask who can release a run and whether the file is checksummed or signed on the way to the bank, because the gap between approval and transmission is where payment fraud lives.", "seeAlso": "payment-file; segregation-of-duties; accounts-payable; early-payment-discount", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "payroll-journal", "term": "Payroll journal", "definition": "The accounting entry generated by a payroll run: labour cost by cost centre, employer contributions, net pay liability, and the deductions owed to third parties.", "whyItMatters": "Ask to see the journal for a multi-entity, multi-country run, because this is where payroll and finance systems most often fail to meet.", "seeAlso": "payroll-run; gross-to-net; clearing-account; cost-centre", "modules": "hr-payroll; financial-management" }, { "slug": "payroll-run", "term": "Payroll run", "definition": "The periodic calculation of gross pay, statutory and voluntary deductions, employer costs and net pay, producing payments, filings and the journal that posts labour cost to the ledger.", "whyItMatters": "Ask how the payroll journal reaches the ledger, at what grain, and whether it can be split by cost centre and project, because a single summarised journal destroys labour-cost reporting.", "seeAlso": "payroll-journal; gross-to-net; statutory-filing; timesheet", "modules": "hr-payroll; financial-management" }, { "slug": "pbc-list", "term": "Prepared-by-client list", "definition": "The schedule of documents and reports an auditor asks the company to produce for fieldwork: trial balances, reconciliations, samples, access listings, contracts.", "whyItMatters": "Ask which items on a typical list the system can produce as standard reports, since every bespoke extract on that list is a week of somebody's year, every year.", "seeAlso": "external-audit; audit-evidence; sampling; account-reconciliation", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "penetration-test", "term": "Penetration test", "definition": "An authorised attempt to break into a system to find exploitable weaknesses, performed to a defined scope with findings ranked and remediated.", "whyItMatters": "Ask for the date, scope and remediation status of the most recent test, and whether customers may run their own, since the answer to the last part varies widely.", "seeAlso": "soc-2; iso-27001; disaster-recovery", "modules": "ai-features" }, { "slug": "peppol", "term": "Peppol", "definition": "An international network and document specification for exchanging electronic invoices and orders through accredited access points, mandated or encouraged in much of Europe and beyond.", "whyItMatters": "Ask whether the system connects to Peppol directly or through a partner, and who is the accredited access point, since that relationship carries its own fees and obligations.", "seeAlso": "e-invoicing-clearance; edi; continuous-transaction-controls; digital-reporting-requirements", "modules": "localizations; procurement" }, { "slug": "percentage-of-completion", "term": "Percentage of completion", "definition": "Recognising revenue and cost on a long contract in proportion to progress, measured by cost incurred against expected cost, by units delivered, or by surveyed effort.", "whyItMatters": "Ask which progress measures the system supports and how a change in expected total cost is handled, because that revision is what turns a profitable contract into a loss-making one overnight.", "seeAlso": "project-costing; work-in-progress; milestone-billing; project-accounting", "modules": "project-management; financial-management" }, { "slug": "performance-obligation", "term": "Performance obligation", "definition": "A distinct promise in a contract — a licence, a hosting service, an implementation, support — that revenue is allocated to and recognised against as it is satisfied.", "whyItMatters": "Ask how obligations are identified and allocated in the system, because a contract modelled as one line cannot produce a defensible revenue schedule for a bundled deal.", "seeAlso": "standalone-selling-price; revenue-recognition; contract-liability; revenue-schedule", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "period-close", "term": "Period close", "definition": "The routine that finishes a month, quarter or year: posting the remaining accruals and adjustments, reconciling the subledgers to the ledger, reviewing the results, and locking the period so nothing moves after it is reported. Most finance teams measure it in working days from period end to reported numbers.", "whyItMatters": "Ask how the system enforces the lock, who can reopen a closed period and what that leaves behind in the audit trail, because a period that can be quietly reopened is a period whose reported numbers cannot be trusted later.", "seeAlso": "accrual; trial-balance; bank-reconciliation; audit-trail", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "period-lock", "term": "Period lock", "definition": "The setting that prevents further posting into a closed period, usually per module, per entity and per user role, sometimes with a controlled reopening for late adjustments.", "whyItMatters": "Ask who can reopen a locked period, whether the reopening is logged, and whether reporting already issued is flagged as superseded, since all three come up in the first audit after go-live.", "seeAlso": "hard-close; audit-trail; segregation-of-duties; fiscal-calendar", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "perpetual-licence", "term": "Perpetual licence", "definition": "A one-off purchase of the right to use a version indefinitely, with an annual support and maintenance fee for updates and assistance.", "whyItMatters": "Ask what happens when support lapses and what a later re-instatement costs, because for on-premise estates that clause governs your real exit options.", "seeAlso": "subscription-licensing; annual-support-fee; total-cost-of-ownership", "modules": "ai-features" }, { "slug": "pillar-two", "term": "Pillar Two", "definition": "The international agreement imposing a minimum effective tax rate on large multinational groups, requiring jurisdiction-level effective-rate calculations and top-up tax where the rate falls short.", "whyItMatters": "Ask what data the system can supply for the calculation, because the inputs sit across ledger, tax and consolidation systems and assembling them by hand each year is expensive.", "seeAlso": "country-by-country-reporting; transfer-pricing; group-reporting", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "po-flip", "term": "PO flip", "definition": "Turning a purchase order into an invoice on the supplier's behalf, either in a portal or automatically on receipt, so the invoice matches by construction rather than by reconciliation.", "whyItMatters": "Ask which suppliers realistically adopt it, since the technique only pays off at the suppliers who send you the most invoices and adoption is a commercial conversation, not a technical one.", "seeAlso": "three-way-matching; purchase-order; self-billing; e-procurement", "modules": "procurement" }, { "slug": "prepaid-expense", "term": "Prepaid expense", "definition": "Cash paid in advance for something you have not yet consumed — insurance, an annual software subscription, rent — held as an asset and released to expense over the period it covers. It is the mirror image of an accrual.", "whyItMatters": "The manual work is in the amortisation schedules, so check whether the system can create one from the invoice itself and post the release automatically, or whether every renewal spawns another line in a spreadsheet.", "seeAlso": "accrual; period-close; deferred-revenue; subledger", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "presentation-currency", "term": "Presentation currency", "definition": "The currency the group's financial statements are shown in, which may differ from every entity's functional currency. Choosing it does not change the underlying transactions, only their expression.", "whyItMatters": "Ask whether reporting can be produced in more than one presentation currency without a re-run, because banks and boards often want different ones.", "seeAlso": "functional-currency; currency-translation; group-reporting", "modules": "financial-management; business-intelligence" }, { "slug": "preventive-maintenance", "term": "Preventive maintenance", "definition": "Maintenance scheduled by time or usage rather than by failure, generating work orders against assets on a plan and recording what was done.", "whyItMatters": "Ask whether maintenance history sits against the asset record used for depreciation, because two asset registers is a reconciliation nobody wants to own.", "seeAlso": "field-service-management; fixed-asset-register; asset-hierarchy; work-order", "modules": "asset-management; field-service" }, { "slug": "price-book", "term": "Price book", "definition": "The structured set of prices, discounts and currencies applicable to customers or segments, with effective dates. Quotes and orders price from it rather than from typed figures.", "whyItMatters": "Ask how price changes are staged and approved, and whether historic prices are retained, because a price book without effective dating cannot reproduce last year's invoice.", "seeAlso": "tiered-pricing; quote-to-cash; customer-master", "modules": "crm; financial-management" }, { "slug": "price-uplift-cap", "term": "Price uplift cap", "definition": "A contractual ceiling on how much prices may rise at renewal, either a fixed percentage or a published index plus a margin.", "whyItMatters": "Negotiate this before the first renewal rather than at it, since a multi-year subscription with no cap prices its later years at the vendor's discretion.", "seeAlso": "renewal; annual-support-fee; multi-year-commitment; auto-renewal", "modules": "ai-features" }, { "slug": "procure-to-pay", "term": "Procure to pay", "definition": "The end-to-end process from identifying a need to paying the supplier: requisition, approval, purchase order, receipt, invoice, matching and payment, with the ledger entries each step creates.", "whyItMatters": "Ask what proportion of spend the process actually covers today and could cover in the new system, since spend that bypasses it is spend nobody controlled.", "seeAlso": "order-to-cash; requisition; purchase-order; three-way-matching; spend-under-management", "modules": "procurement; financial-management" }, { "slug": "project-accounting", "term": "Project accounting", "definition": "Tracking revenue and cost against a project rather than only against the ledger — time and expenses booked to a job, work in progress, billing on milestones or on time and materials, and margin per engagement. Services businesses and construction firms usually need it; product businesses often do not.", "whyItMatters": "If this matters to you, insist on seeing time capture, revenue release and invoicing running as one flow on a project shaped like yours, because bolted-on project modules tend to break at the point where the project meets the ledger.", "seeAlso": "revenue-recognition; dimensions; capital-expenditure", "modules": "project-management; financial-management" }, { "slug": "project-costing", "term": "Project costing", "definition": "Collecting labour, materials, expenses and overhead against a project so its cost and margin can be reported while it runs, not only when it ends.", "whyItMatters": "Ask how labour cost rates are held and how often they change, since a project system fed by stale rates reports a margin nobody can act on.", "seeAlso": "project-accounting; work-in-progress; utilisation-rate; time-and-materials", "modules": "project-management; financial-management" }, { "slug": "proration", "term": "Proration", "definition": "Charging or crediting part of a period when a subscription starts, stops or changes mid-cycle, calculated by days, by usage or by a stated convention.", "whyItMatters": "Ask which proration convention is applied and whether it can differ by product, because customers notice proration errors immediately and they erode trust quickly.", "seeAlso": "subscription-billing; revenue-schedule; expansion-revenue; churn", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "provision", "term": "Provision", "definition": "A liability recognised for an obligation whose amount or timing is uncertain — warranty claims, restructuring, legal exposure. It is measured on a best estimate and revisited each period.", "whyItMatters": "Ask how provisions are tracked with their supporting calculation and release, since provisions maintained outside the ledger are the classic source of a balance nobody can explain.", "seeAlso": "bad-debt-provision; accrual; balance-sheet-substantiation", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "punchout", "term": "Punchout", "definition": "A link from the buying system into a supplier's own web store, where the requisitioner shops and returns with a basket that becomes a requisition, using contracted prices.", "whyItMatters": "Ask which punchout standards are supported and how many are live at reference customers, because this is an area where support in principle and support in production differ widely.", "seeAlso": "contract-catalogue; e-procurement; requisition", "modules": "procurement" }, { "slug": "purchase-accounting", "term": "Purchase accounting", "definition": "The exercise of recognising an acquired business at fair value: identifying assets and liabilities, allocating the price, recognising goodwill, and aligning the acquired entity's policies and calendar to the group's.", "whyItMatters": "Ask what an acquisition looks like in the system a month after signing, since acquisitive groups feel this cost every time and rarely test it during selection.", "seeAlso": "goodwill; group-reporting; fiscal-calendar; chart-of-accounts", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "purchase-order", "term": "Purchase order", "definition": "The document that commits the business to buying something at an agreed quantity and price, issued to the supplier after whatever internal approval the spend requires. It is the authorisation record that later invoices are checked against, and it also gives you a view of committed spend before any invoice exists.", "whyItMatters": "How easy a system makes raising and approving a purchase order decides whether people use it at all, and spend that bypasses the order process is spend nobody sees until the invoice arrives.", "seeAlso": "goods-receipt; three-way-matching; accrual; segregation-of-duties", "modules": "procurement; financial-management" }, { "slug": "quality-inspection", "term": "Quality inspection", "definition": "A defined check at goods receipt, in process or before dispatch, with sampling plans, characteristics measured, and a pass or fail that gates the next step.", "whyItMatters": "Ask whether inspection results block movement automatically, since a check that records a failure but lets the stock ship is documentation rather than control.", "seeAlso": "non-conformance; batch-traceability; goods-receipt; stock-take", "modules": "quality-management; inventory-management" }, { "slug": "quote-to-cash", "term": "Quote to cash", "definition": "The commercial front of order to cash: configuring and pricing an offer, approving discounts, getting signature, and turning the signed contract into an order and a billing schedule.", "whyItMatters": "Ask whether the signed contract creates the billing schedule automatically, since re-keying commercial terms into finance is where subscription businesses lose revenue.", "seeAlso": "order-to-cash; price-book; subscription-billing; bookings", "modules": "crm; financial-management" }, { "slug": "ramp-deal", "term": "Ramp deal", "definition": "A contract where committed volume and price step up over the term, reflecting a planned rollout rather than charging full scale from day one.", "whyItMatters": "Ask what happens if the rollout slips, since a ramp tied to dates rather than to milestones bills you for users a delayed programme has not created.", "seeAlso": "multi-year-commitment; shelfware; true-up; price-uplift-cap", "modules": "ai-features" }, { "slug": "recovery-objectives", "term": "RPO and RTO", "definition": "Recovery point objective is how much data you can afford to lose, measured in time; recovery time objective is how long you can afford to be down. Both are commitments, not aspirations.", "whyItMatters": "Ask for both figures in the contract with the remedy for missing them, since numbers that appear only in marketing material are not commitments.", "seeAlso": "disaster-recovery; uptime-sla; service-credit", "modules": "ai-features" }, { "slug": "recurring-journal", "term": "Recurring journal", "definition": "A journal that posts on a schedule with the same structure and either the same or a calculated amount — rent, depreciation, standing allocations. It removes repetitive keying from the close.", "whyItMatters": "Ask how a recurring journal is amended and who approves the change, because a template nobody reviews continues posting long after the underlying contract has ended.", "seeAlso": "journal-template; allocation; adjusting-entry; audit-trail", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "regression-testing", "term": "Regression testing", "definition": "Re-running tests over unchanged functionality after a change, to confirm nothing that used to work has stopped. Automation is what makes it affordable at each release.", "whyItMatters": "Ask whether the vendor supplies test automation or expects you to build it, because with a frequent release cadence manual regression becomes a permanent team.", "seeAlso": "system-integration-testing; user-acceptance-testing; release-cadence; evergreen-upgrade", "modules": "project-management" }, { "slug": "release-cadence", "term": "Release cadence", "definition": "How often the vendor ships changes and how much choice a customer has about taking them: continuous, monthly, twice-yearly, or on the customer's own schedule for on-premise software.", "whyItMatters": "Ask what a customer must do per release and what the vendor does, because a twice-yearly mandatory upgrade is a recurring project you should staff for from the start.", "seeAlso": "evergreen-upgrade; regression-testing; sandbox; tenant", "modules": "ai-features" }, { "slug": "remittance-advice", "term": "Remittance advice", "definition": "The note a payer sends saying which invoices a payment covers, arriving as an email attachment, a portal download or a structured message alongside the payment. Without it, cash application becomes detective work.", "whyItMatters": "Ask how unstructured remittances are captured, since most of the effort in receivables automation is reading advices that arrive as PDFs rather than as data.", "seeAlso": "cash-application; accounts-receivable; bank-reconciliation", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "renewal", "term": "Renewal", "definition": "The continuation of a subscription at the end of its term, either automatically under the contract or by a new agreement, often with a price change and a re-negotiated scope.", "whyItMatters": "Ask how renewal dates, notice periods and uplift caps are held and surfaced in advance, since a missed notice period is a year of unwanted commitment on either side.", "seeAlso": "auto-renewal; churn; expansion-revenue; price-uplift-cap", "modules": "crm; financial-management" }, { "slug": "request-for-information", "term": "Request for information", "definition": "An earlier, lighter enquiry used to understand the market and shortlist candidates before a full proposal exercise. It gathers capability, not price.", "whyItMatters": "Use it to establish which vendors genuinely serve your size and sector, since a proposal exercise with unsuitable vendors in it wastes everyone's time including yours.", "seeAlso": "request-for-proposal; rfq; fit-gap-analysis", "modules": "project-management; procurement" }, { "slug": "request-for-proposal", "term": "Request for proposal", "definition": "A structured invitation to vendors to propose against defined requirements, commercial terms and evaluation criteria, with responses compared on the same basis.", "whyItMatters": "Publish how responses will be evaluated and stick to it, because an evaluation whose weighting is decided after the responses arrive tends to confirm a decision already made.", "seeAlso": "request-for-information; rfq; statement-of-work; requirements-traceability", "modules": "project-management; procurement" }, { "slug": "requirements-traceability", "term": "Requirements traceability", "definition": "Keeping a link from each stated requirement through design and configuration to the test that proves it, so nothing agreed is quietly dropped.", "whyItMatters": "Ask how traceability is maintained and reported, since a requirement with no test is a requirement you will discover missing after go-live.", "seeAlso": "fit-gap-analysis; user-acceptance-testing; statement-of-work; request-for-proposal", "modules": "project-management" }, { "slug": "requisition", "term": "Requisition", "definition": "An internal request to buy something, approved before any commitment is made to a supplier and converted into a purchase order once it is. It is where budget control belongs.", "whyItMatters": "Ask whether budget is checked at requisition rather than at invoice, because a control that fires after the goods arrive is a reporting line, not a control.", "seeAlso": "purchase-order; procure-to-pay; budget-check; approval-workflow", "modules": "procurement" }, { "slug": "rest-api", "term": "REST API", "definition": "An interface exposing a system's data and operations over standard web requests, so other software can read and write records under the same rules a user would face.", "whyItMatters": "Ask whether every object you need is covered, what the rate limits are, and whether the API is versioned, because an integration built on an undocumented endpoint breaks at the vendor's next release.", "seeAlso": "webhook; ipaas; api-first; single-source-of-truth", "modules": "ai-features; business-intelligence" }, { "slug": "retainage", "term": "Retainage", "definition": "A portion of a contract payment withheld until completion or acceptance, common in construction and engineering. It sits as a receivable or payable until released.", "whyItMatters": "Ask whether retainage is tracked on the invoice and released automatically on acceptance, since retention balances tracked outside the system are frequently forgotten.", "seeAlso": "milestone-billing; project-accounting; accounts-receivable", "modules": "project-management; financial-management" }, { "slug": "retained-earnings", "term": "Retained earnings", "definition": "Cumulative profit not distributed to owners, carried in equity. At year end the income statement's result is closed into it, resetting revenue and expense accounts to zero for the new year.", "whyItMatters": "Ask how the system posts the year-end transfer per entity and per currency, since a group with several reporting currencies can accumulate translation differences here that nobody owns.", "seeAlso": "year-end-close; balance-sheet; closing-entry; currency-translation", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "revenue-recognition", "term": "Revenue recognition", "definition": "Deciding when and how much revenue to record, which is not the same question as when you invoice or get paid. The prevailing frameworks — ASC 606 under US GAAP and IFRS 15 — work through identifying the contract and its distinct promises, setting a transaction price, allocating it across those promises, and recognising each as it is delivered; local frameworks elsewhere may differ, and any specific treatment is a matter for your auditors.", "whyItMatters": "If the system cannot hold the contract, allocate a price across its elements and release revenue on its own schedule, that logic lands in a spreadsheet that becomes an audit issue — so demo it with a contract shaped like your real ones, including a mid-term change.", "seeAlso": "deferred-revenue; subledger; statutory-reporting; period-close", "modules": "financial-management; project-management" }, { "slug": "revenue-schedule", "term": "Revenue schedule", "definition": "The period-by-period plan for recognising a contract's revenue, generated from its obligations and their delivery pattern, and adjusted when the contract changes.", "whyItMatters": "Ask what a mid-term upgrade does to an existing schedule, because contract modifications are where revenue systems separate from spreadsheets.", "seeAlso": "performance-obligation; deferred-revenue; contract-liability; proration", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "reverse-charge", "term": "Reverse charge", "definition": "A mechanism shifting the obligation to account for tax from the seller to the buyer, used for cross-border services and some domestic sectors. The buyer charges and reclaims the tax itself.", "whyItMatters": "Ask how the system decides when reverse charge applies and what it prints on the invoice, because the required wording is a condition of the treatment in most jurisdictions.", "seeAlso": "vat; tax-determination; tax-identifier-validation; ec-sales-list", "modules": "financial-management; localizations" }, { "slug": "reversing-entry", "term": "Reversing entry", "definition": "An entry created specifically to be reversed automatically in the following period, used for accruals so the estimate does not have to be removed by hand once the real transaction arrives.", "whyItMatters": "Ask whether reversal is scheduled at posting time and visible before it happens, since accruals that must be reversed manually are the most common cause of a doubled cost.", "seeAlso": "accrual; adjusting-entry; recurring-journal; period-close", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "rfq", "term": "Request for quotation", "definition": "A structured request to suppliers for prices against a defined specification and quantity, with responses compared on a like-for-like basis. It is the sourcing step before a purchase order.", "whyItMatters": "Ask whether responses are captured as data that can be compared and awarded from, because quotations collected by email are compared in a spreadsheet and the audit trail ends there.", "seeAlso": "request-for-proposal; requisition; contract-catalogue; procure-to-pay", "modules": "procurement" }, { "slug": "role-based-access-control", "term": "Role-based access control", "definition": "Granting permissions to roles and assigning people to roles, rather than granting rights person by person, so access can be reviewed and reasoned about.", "whyItMatters": "Ask for a report of who can perform each sensitive action and whether conflicting roles are flagged, since that report is what an auditor will ask for first.", "seeAlso": "segregation-of-duties; single-sign-on; data-governance; access-review", "modules": "ai-features" }, { "slug": "routing", "term": "Routing", "definition": "The sequence of operations, work centres and standard times required to make a product. Together with the bill of materials it defines how a work order will be planned, scheduled and costed.", "whyItMatters": "Ask whether alternate routings and subcontracted operations are first-class, because most real factories run both and modelling them as exceptions distorts capacity planning.", "seeAlso": "bill-of-materials; work-order; capacity-planning; standard-costing", "modules": "manufacturing-management" }, { "slug": "run-cost", "term": "Run cost", "definition": "The annual cost of operating the system after go-live: subscription or support, hosting, internal team, managed services, and the small-change budget.", "whyItMatters": "Ask for the run cost of a comparable customer three years in, because business cases are usually built on year-one cost and judged on year-three reality.", "seeAlso": "total-cost-of-ownership; managed-services; implementation-multiple; change-request-rate", "modules": "project-management" }, { "slug": "saf-t", "term": "SAF-T", "definition": "Standard Audit File for Tax: a structured export of ledger, master data and transactions in a schema an authority specifies, required in Portugal, Poland, Norway, Romania and elsewhere.", "whyItMatters": "Ask which countries' schemas the vendor generates and maintains, since the file must validate against the authority's own schema and schemas change without much notice.", "seeAlso": "statutory-filing; audit-file; localisation; continuous-transaction-controls", "modules": "localizations; financial-management" }, { "slug": "safety-stock", "term": "Safety stock", "definition": "Inventory deliberately held above expected demand to absorb variability in demand and supply. Setting it is a trade-off between service level and the cash and space the stock consumes.", "whyItMatters": "Ask whether the system can hold different rules per item and location and recalculate them from actual variability, rather than expecting a planner to type a number and forget it.", "seeAlso": "material-requirements-planning; demand-forecasting; inventory-turnover; stock-take", "modules": "inventory-management; supply-chain-management" }, { "slug": "sales-and-use-tax", "term": "Sales and use tax", "definition": "The United States model: sales tax charged by the seller where it has an obligation, and use tax self-assessed by the buyer where the seller did not charge it. Rates vary by state and by thousands of local jurisdictions.", "whyItMatters": "Ask whether rates and rules come from a maintained content service or from tables someone loads, because manually maintained United States tax tables are wrong within weeks.", "seeAlso": "nexus; tax-engine; tax-determination; vat", "modules": "financial-management; localizations" }, { "slug": "sampling", "term": "Sampling", "definition": "Selecting a subset of transactions to test rather than examining all of them, with the population, the method and the size documented so the conclusion can be defended.", "whyItMatters": "Ask whether transaction populations can be exported with the attributes a sample needs, because most audit friction is about defining the population, not about testing the sample.", "seeAlso": "test-of-effectiveness; audit-evidence; materiality; external-audit", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "sandbox", "term": "Sandbox", "definition": "A non-production copy of the system for configuration, testing and training, ideally refreshable from production data with sensitive fields masked.", "whyItMatters": "Ask how many environments the licence includes, how a refresh is requested and how long it takes, because a single shared sandbox will throttle both testing and training.", "seeAlso": "tenant; regression-testing; system-integration-testing; release-cadence", "modules": "project-management" }, { "slug": "segregation-of-duties", "term": "Segregation of duties", "definition": "Splitting a sensitive process so that no one person can complete it alone — the person who sets up a supplier is not the person who approves its invoices or releases the payment. In a system this is expressed as roles and permissions, and as rules about which combinations of them one user may hold.", "whyItMatters": "Ask whether the system can report on conflicting role combinations rather than only listing permissions, and how an emergency override is granted and recorded, because small teams break these rules routinely and need the exception to be visible.", "seeAlso": "audit-trail; three-way-matching; journal-entry; purchase-order", "modules": "financial-management; procurement" }, { "slug": "self-billing", "term": "Self-billing", "definition": "An arrangement where the buyer raises the invoice on the supplier's behalf under an agreement, common in agency, haulage and commission models. Tax rules impose specific conditions on it.", "whyItMatters": "Ask whether the system supports self-billing with the tax documentation each jurisdiction requires, because doing it informally creates a tax exposure rather than an efficiency.", "seeAlso": "po-flip; vat; e-invoicing-clearance; supplier-master", "modules": "procurement; localizations" }, { "slug": "sepa", "term": "SEPA", "definition": "The Single Euro Payments Area scheme for euro credit transfers and direct debits across participating European countries, with standard message formats and mandates.", "whyItMatters": "Ask whether direct-debit mandate management is supported natively if you collect by SEPA, since mandates have legal validity rules that a spreadsheet will not enforce.", "seeAlso": "payment-file; ach; direct-debit; payment-run", "modules": "financial-management; localizations" }, { "slug": "serial-number-tracking", "term": "Serial number tracking", "definition": "Identifying individual units through production, sale, service and return, as distinct from tracking a batch. It underpins warranty and field service.", "whyItMatters": "Ask whether serials carry through to service history and warranty entitlement, since a serial recorded only at dispatch cannot answer the question a service engineer has.", "seeAlso": "batch-traceability; warranty-management; field-service-management; inventory-management-basics", "modules": "inventory-management; field-service" }, { "slug": "service-credit", "term": "Service credit", "definition": "The compensation for a missed service commitment, usually a percentage of fees, often capped and often the sole remedy under the contract.", "whyItMatters": "Compare the credit to the cost of the outage to your business, since a credit worth a fraction of one month's fee is a rounding error rather than a deterrent.", "seeAlso": "uptime-sla; recovery-objectives; termination-for-convenience", "modules": "ai-features" }, { "slug": "shelfware", "term": "Shelfware", "definition": "Licences or modules paid for and never deployed, usually acquired in a bundle discount or bought ahead of a plan that changed.", "whyItMatters": "Ask what happens to unused entitlement at renewal, since the answer is often that it renews at full price whether or not you ever switched it on.", "seeAlso": "named-user-licence; module-based-licensing; renewal; total-cost-of-ownership", "modules": "ai-features" }, { "slug": "single-sign-on", "term": "Single sign-on", "definition": "Authenticating through the organisation's own identity provider rather than a separate password per application, usually over SAML or OpenID Connect.", "whyItMatters": "Ask whether it is included or a paid tier, and whether provisioning and de-provisioning are automated, since manual leaver processes are a standard audit finding.", "seeAlso": "role-based-access-control; segregation-of-duties; audit-trail; soc-2", "modules": "ai-features" }, { "slug": "single-source-of-truth", "term": "Single source of truth", "definition": "The principle that one system holds the authoritative version of a given fact, and everything else reads from it rather than keeping its own copy.", "whyItMatters": "Ask which system is authoritative for each shared object in the proposed design, because \"both\" is the answer that produces years of reconciliation work.", "seeAlso": "master-data-management; data-governance; business-intelligence-basics", "modules": "ai-features" }, { "slug": "soc-2", "term": "SOC 2", "definition": "An audited report on a service organisation's controls for security, availability, integrity, confidentiality and privacy. A Type 2 report covers operation over a period, not just design.", "whyItMatters": "Ask for the current Type 2 report and read the exceptions and the complementary controls you are expected to run, since those pages are the useful part.", "seeAlso": "iso-27001; penetration-test; internal-control; uptime-sla", "modules": "ai-features" }, { "slug": "soft-close", "term": "Soft close", "definition": "A faster, lighter close run in interim periods: key accruals and reconciliations only, enough for management reporting, without the full statutory rigour. Many groups soft-close monthly and hard-close quarterly.", "whyItMatters": "Ask which steps the system lets you skip and still produce comparable numbers, since a soft close that leaves the ledger inconsistent forces a rework at the hard close.", "seeAlso": "hard-close; period-close; close-checklist; management-reporting", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "sox-controls", "term": "SOX controls", "definition": "The documented, tested controls over financial reporting required of companies listed in the United States under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, including controls embedded in systems and in access to them.", "whyItMatters": "Ask what a vendor supplies to support a controls programme — standard reports for access, change and approval evidence — since building that reporting after listing is far more expensive than asking now.", "seeAlso": "internal-control; key-control; segregation-of-duties; material-weakness", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "spend-under-management", "term": "Spend under management", "definition": "The share of total third-party spend that runs through defined sourcing and purchasing processes, with agreed suppliers, prices and approvals. The remainder is unmanaged by definition.", "whyItMatters": "Ask how the system measures it rather than how it improves it, since a number nobody computes cannot be improved and every procurement business case rests on this one.", "seeAlso": "maverick-spend; procure-to-pay; contract-catalogue; non-po-invoice", "modules": "procurement" }, { "slug": "standalone-selling-price", "term": "Standalone selling price", "definition": "The price an element of a bundle would sell for on its own, used to allocate a bundled contract's total price across its performance obligations.", "whyItMatters": "Ask where these prices are held and how they are evidenced, since allocation is only as defensible as the price library behind it and auditors test that library.", "seeAlso": "performance-obligation; revenue-recognition; revenue-schedule", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "standard-costing", "term": "Standard costing", "definition": "Valuing production at a pre-set expected cost per unit and reporting the difference from actual cost as variances — price, usage, labour, overhead absorption. It makes manufacturing performance legible at the cost of a periodic revaluation exercise.", "whyItMatters": "Ask how a standard-cost roll-up is recalculated and what happens to work in progress when it changes mid-period, because that mechanic decides whether your cost accountant spends a week each quarter on it.", "seeAlso": "inventory-valuation; bill-of-materials; variance-analysis; work-in-progress", "modules": "manufacturing-management; financial-management" }, { "slug": "statement-of-work", "term": "Statement of work", "definition": "The contractual description of what an implementer will deliver: scope, deliverables, assumptions, responsibilities, acceptance criteria and price basis.", "whyItMatters": "Read the assumptions section first, since it is where risk is transferred back to you and where the difference between a fixed price and an estimate actually lives.", "seeAlso": "change-order; fixed-price-contract; implementation-partner; acceptance-criteria", "modules": "project-management" }, { "slug": "statutory-chart-of-accounts", "term": "Statutory chart of accounts", "definition": "A prescribed account structure a country requires accounts to be reported in, as in France, Belgium, Poland and others. It coexists with a group's own management structure.", "whyItMatters": "Ask how a group chart and a statutory chart are mapped and maintained, because a group that runs the statutory chart as its only chart cripples management reporting.", "seeAlso": "chart-of-accounts; local-gaap; statutory-reporting; statutory-vs-management", "modules": "localizations; financial-management" }, { "slug": "statutory-filing", "term": "Statutory filing", "definition": "A return a company must submit to an authority on a schedule: payroll returns, tax returns, statistical declarations, statutory accounts. Each has a format, a deadline and a penalty.", "whyItMatters": "Ask which filings the system generates for your countries and who maintains them when the format changes, since a filing produced by a partner's script is a dependency you did not price.", "seeAlso": "statutory-reporting; payroll-run; vat; saf-t", "modules": "localizations; financial-management" }, { "slug": "statutory-reporting", "term": "Statutory reporting", "definition": "The filings a business is legally required to produce — annual accounts in the local framework, tax returns, and in many countries periodic electronic submissions in a prescribed format. What is required, in which format, and how often varies substantially by jurisdiction, and management reporting rarely satisfies it as-is.", "whyItMatters": "Confirm which of your countries' filings the vendor produces natively, which come from a partner or a third-party tool, and which your team will assemble by hand, because that split is a recurring annual cost rather than a one-off.", "seeAlso": "localisation; legal-entity; e-invoicing-clearance; multi-entity-consolidation", "modules": "localizations; financial-management; business-intelligence" }, { "slug": "statutory-vs-management", "term": "Statutory versus management reporting", "definition": "The distinction between numbers prepared to satisfy law and standards and numbers prepared to run the business. They come from the same transactions but often use different groupings, adjustments and calendars.", "whyItMatters": "Ask how the system holds both views without a second set of books, because a group that maintains two ledgers to serve both audiences doubles its close.", "seeAlso": "management-reporting; statutory-reporting; local-gaap; dimensions", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "stock-take", "term": "Stock take", "definition": "Counting physical inventory and reconciling it to the recorded quantities, either as a full count or as continuous cycle counting of subsets. Differences are posted as adjustments with a reason.", "whyItMatters": "Ask whether cycle counting can run without freezing transactions, since a warehouse that must stop moving to count will count rarely and be wrong in between.", "seeAlso": "inventory-valuation; safety-stock; warehouse-management-system", "modules": "inventory-management; warehouse-management" }, { "slug": "subledger", "term": "Subledger", "definition": "A detailed ledger for one class of transaction — receivables, payables, fixed assets, stock — that holds the line-by-line records behind a single summary balance in the general ledger. The subledger is where you see which customer owes what; the ledger only shows the total.", "whyItMatters": "Every subledger has to reconcile to its control account, so ask how the system proves that agreement and what it does when the two drift, because chasing an unexplained difference between a payables listing and the ledger is a genuinely bad month.", "seeAlso": "general-ledger; trial-balance; fixed-asset-register; period-close", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "subscription-billing", "term": "Subscription billing", "definition": "Invoicing recurring charges on a cycle, handling mid-term changes, usage, credits and renewals, and producing the entries that feed revenue recognition.", "whyItMatters": "Ask to see an upgrade mid-cycle with proration, a downgrade, and a cancellation with a credit, since those three cases expose most billing implementations.", "seeAlso": "proration; usage-based-billing; billings; renewal", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "subscription-licensing", "term": "Subscription licensing", "definition": "Paying an ongoing fee for the right to use software, usually per user per period, as against a perpetual licence bought once with an annual maintenance fee on top. The subscription is an operating cost that continues for as long as you use the system; the perpetual model front-loads the spend and is increasingly hard to buy for cloud products.", "whyItMatters": "The number that matters is not year one but year five, so model the uplift clauses, the user-count growth, and what the price does at renewal once migrating away has become expensive.", "seeAlso": "total-cost-of-ownership; multi-tenant; implementation-partner", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "supplier-master", "term": "Supplier master", "definition": "The record of each supplier: legal name, addresses, tax identifiers, payment terms and bank details, with the approval history of changes to them. It is the highest-risk master data a finance system holds.", "whyItMatters": "Ask what controls sit on a bank-detail change — dual approval, callback, notification, a hold on payments after a change — because this is the mechanism most payment fraud uses.", "seeAlso": "supplier-onboarding; payment-run; segregation-of-duties; master-data-management", "modules": "procurement; financial-management" }, { "slug": "supplier-onboarding", "term": "Supplier onboarding", "definition": "Bringing a new supplier into the system: collecting bank and tax details, verifying identity and sanctions status, agreeing terms, and creating the master record.", "whyItMatters": "Ask whether suppliers submit their own details through a portal with verification, since re-keying bank details from an emailed form is both slow and the weakest link in the chain.", "seeAlso": "supplier-master; tax-identifier-validation; procure-to-pay", "modules": "procurement" }, { "slug": "supply-chain-finance", "term": "Supply chain finance", "definition": "An arrangement where a funder pays suppliers early against approved invoices and the buyer pays the funder at or after the original due date, extending buyer terms without squeezing suppliers.", "whyItMatters": "Ask how the arrangement is presented on the balance sheet and disclosed, since classification of these balances has been a recurring point of contention with auditors and regulators.", "seeAlso": "dynamic-discounting; working-capital; accounts-payable", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "supply-chain-management-basics", "term": "Supply chain management", "definition": "Planning and executing the flow of goods from supplier to customer: sourcing, planning, inventory, warehousing, transport and the visibility to manage them together.", "whyItMatters": "Ask where the system's boundary sits with dedicated planning and transport products, since ERP breadth here varies more than in any other area.", "seeAlso": "material-requirements-planning; warehouse-management-system; demand-forecasting; edi", "modules": "supply-chain-management" }, { "slug": "suspense-account", "term": "Suspense account", "definition": "A holding account for entries that cannot yet be classified, intended to be emptied before the books close. Common sources are unmatched bank items and failed integration postings.", "whyItMatters": "Ask what the system posts to suspense automatically and whether a period can be closed with a balance sitting there, because a close that tolerates it will accumulate errors invisibly.", "seeAlso": "clearing-account; bank-reconciliation; period-close; double-entry-bookkeeping", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "system-integration-testing", "term": "System integration testing", "definition": "Testing that the connected systems work together end to end — the ERP, the warehouse system, the bank, the tax engine — rather than each component in isolation.", "whyItMatters": "Ask how integration testing is scheduled and who owns defects that sit between two vendors, since that gap is where go-live dates are usually lost.", "seeAlso": "regression-testing; user-acceptance-testing; parallel-run; cutover", "modules": "project-management" }, { "slug": "tax-code", "term": "Tax code", "definition": "The configured combination of rate, treatment and reporting box that a transaction line is stamped with, driving both the amount charged and where it appears on a return.", "whyItMatters": "Ask how many tax codes a comparable customer runs and who maintains them, because an unmanaged tax code list produces returns nobody can reconcile.", "seeAlso": "tax-determination; tax-jurisdiction; statutory-filing; chart-of-accounts", "modules": "financial-management; localizations" }, { "slug": "tax-determination", "term": "Tax determination", "definition": "Deciding which tax applies to a transaction, at what rate, on what basis, from the parties' locations and registrations, the item's classification and the transaction's nature.", "whyItMatters": "Ask to see determination on your hardest case — a cross-border service to a registered business, or a drop-shipment — since easy cases are determined correctly by every system.", "seeAlso": "tax-engine; vat; sales-and-use-tax; reverse-charge; tax-code", "modules": "financial-management; localizations" }, { "slug": "tax-engine", "term": "Tax engine", "definition": "The component that decides what tax applies to a transaction — the rate, the jurisdiction, the treatment of a cross-border or exempt sale — and keeps that logic current as rules change. Some systems have a capable one built in; many businesses with complex footprints run a specialist third-party engine alongside.", "whyItMatters": "Test it on your genuinely awkward cases in the demo — a cross-border sale, a reverse charge, a partial exemption, a marketplace transaction — because the built-in engine handling the simple case tells you almost nothing.", "seeAlso": "localisation; e-invoicing-clearance; statutory-reporting", "modules": "localizations; financial-management; ecommerce" }, { "slug": "tax-identifier-validation", "term": "Tax identifier validation", "definition": "Checking a counterparty's tax registration number against the issuing authority's register — a VAT number against the European Union's system, for example — and recording the result with a date.", "whyItMatters": "Ask whether validation is automated and evidenced, because in several regimes the right to zero-rate a sale depends on having checked and being able to prove it.", "seeAlso": "supplier-onboarding; vat; reverse-charge; customer-master", "modules": "financial-management; localizations" }, { "slug": "tax-jurisdiction", "term": "Tax jurisdiction", "definition": "The authority whose rules apply to a transaction: a country, a state, a county, a city, or a special zone. A single United States address can sit in several at once.", "whyItMatters": "Ask how addresses are validated and mapped to jurisdictions, since jurisdiction assignment by postcode alone is a known source of misfiled tax.", "seeAlso": "tax-determination; nexus; sales-and-use-tax; tax-code", "modules": "financial-management; localizations" }, { "slug": "technical-debt-in-erp", "term": "Technical debt in ERP", "definition": "Accumulated customisations, workarounds and undocumented interfaces that make each future change more expensive, most often created by pushing process into code rather than changing the process.", "whyItMatters": "Ask a reference customer how many customisations it now regrets, since that conversation is the most useful thirty minutes available during a selection.", "seeAlso": "extension-model; evergreen-upgrade; fit-gap-analysis; conference-room-pilot", "modules": "project-management" }, { "slug": "tenant", "term": "Tenant", "definition": "A customer's isolated slice of a multi-tenant service, with its own data and configuration but sharing the underlying application and infrastructure.", "whyItMatters": "Ask what is shared and what is isolated, and where a tenant's data physically sits, since both answers matter for performance troubleshooting and for residency obligations.", "seeAlso": "multi-tenant; data-residency; sandbox; release-cadence", "modules": "ai-features" }, { "slug": "termination-for-convenience", "term": "Termination for convenience", "definition": "A right to end a contract without cause, on notice and often with a fee. Where it exists at all it is usually one-sided in the vendor's favour on implementation contracts.", "whyItMatters": "Ask what exit assistance is owed and at what rate, because the ability to leave means little without a contractual obligation to help you go.", "seeAlso": "multi-year-commitment; exit-plan; service-credit; statement-of-work", "modules": "ai-features" }, { "slug": "test-of-design", "term": "Test of design", "definition": "Checking that a control, as described, would actually address the risk it claims to: the right person, the right evidence, the right frequency, before anyone asks whether it was performed.", "whyItMatters": "Ask how control descriptions are kept current with configuration changes, because a control whose design no longer matches the system fails the moment it is tested.", "seeAlso": "test-of-effectiveness; internal-control; key-control; walkthrough", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "test-of-effectiveness", "term": "Test of effectiveness", "definition": "Checking that a control actually operated over the period, usually by sampling instances and inspecting evidence. Design and effectiveness fail independently and are tested separately.", "whyItMatters": "Ask whether populations for sampling can be extracted from the system reliably, since a control whose population cannot be defined cannot be tested and will be reported as a deficiency.", "seeAlso": "test-of-design; sampling; audit-evidence; deficiency", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "three-way-matching", "term": "Three-way matching", "definition": "Checking a supplier invoice against both the purchase order that authorised the spend and the goods receipt that confirms it arrived, before the invoice is approved for payment. All three have to agree on quantity and price, within whatever tolerance you set.", "whyItMatters": "It is the main automated control standing between a finance team and paying for something nobody ordered or received, so how well a system does it — and how much of it a buyer can bypass — is worth pressing on in a demo.", "seeAlso": "purchase-order; goods-receipt; segregation-of-duties", "modules": "procurement; financial-management" }, { "slug": "tiered-pricing", "term": "Tiered pricing", "definition": "Pricing that changes with volume, either in bands where each band has its own rate or in steps where the whole volume takes the rate of the band reached.", "whyItMatters": "Ask which tiering shapes are supported without custom code, since a pricing model the system cannot express becomes a manual invoice every month.", "seeAlso": "usage-based-billing; subscription-billing; price-book", "modules": "financial-management; crm" }, { "slug": "time-and-materials", "term": "Time and materials", "definition": "A contract that bills actual hours at agreed rates plus costs incurred, sometimes with a cap. Risk sits mainly with the customer, and margin depends on rate discipline.", "whyItMatters": "Ask how unbilled time is aged and approved, because time captured late or written off silently is the difference between reported and real project margin.", "seeAlso": "fixed-price-contract; timesheet; project-costing; billable-hours", "modules": "project-management; financial-management" }, { "slug": "timesheet", "term": "Timesheet", "definition": "The record of how someone's hours were spent, by project, task and activity, submitted and approved on a cycle and feeding costing, billing and payroll.", "whyItMatters": "Ask what proportion of timesheets a reference customer gets in on time, because every downstream number in a services business depends on that compliance rate.", "seeAlso": "billable-hours; project-costing; utilisation-rate; expense-report", "modules": "project-management; hr-payroll" }, { "slug": "total-cost-of-ownership", "term": "Total cost of ownership", "definition": "What the system costs over a realistic horizon, not what the licence costs: subscription or licence and maintenance, implementation, integration, data migration, third-party add-ons, infrastructure where relevant, training, and the internal time the project consumes. The last item is usually the largest and the least often written down.", "whyItMatters": "Two systems whose quoted subscriptions differ by a factor of two often land far closer once implementation and add-ons are counted, so build the comparison over five years or the difference will be decided by the wrong number.", "seeAlso": "subscription-licensing; implementation-partner; data-migration; multi-tenant", "modules": "financial-management; project-management" }, { "slug": "transfer-pricing", "term": "Transfer pricing", "definition": "The prices charged between entities of the same group for goods, services, financing and intellectual property, which must be defensible as arm's length and documented for tax authorities.", "whyItMatters": "Ask whether intercompany pricing rules and their adjustments can be executed in the system, because year-end transfer-pricing true-ups run by journal are a routine audit and tax exposure.", "seeAlso": "intercompany-matching; withholding-tax; group-reporting; country-by-country-reporting", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "treasury-management", "term": "Treasury management", "definition": "Managing cash, debt, investments and financial risk: knowing the position, funding it, and hedging exposures. In smaller companies it is a task; in larger ones a function with its own systems.", "whyItMatters": "Ask what the ERP does natively versus what needs a treasury system, since the answer moves at about the point a group runs several currencies and banks.", "seeAlso": "cash-positioning; hedge-accounting; bank-connectivity; fx-gain-loss", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "trial-balance", "term": "Trial balance", "definition": "A listing of every account with its balance at a point in time, where total debits equal total credits. It is the working view a finance team reviews before the statements are drawn from it, and the file most often handed to auditors as a starting point.", "whyItMatters": "Check that you can produce one for any date, any entity and any dimension combination without waiting for a report to be built, because a finance team that cannot self-serve this ends up exporting the ledger to a spreadsheet every month.", "seeAlso": "general-ledger; chart-of-accounts; period-close; subledger", "modules": "financial-management; business-intelligence" }, { "slug": "true-up", "term": "True-up", "definition": "The periodic reconciliation of licensed entitlement against actual use, with the difference invoiced. It is a contractual event, not an audit finding.", "whyItMatters": "Ask when true-ups occur, what data they use and whether the price is held at original discount, because an uplift applied at true-up can undo a negotiated deal.", "seeAlso": "licence-audit; named-user-licence; consumption-pricing; price-uplift-cap", "modules": "ai-features" }, { "slug": "two-tier-erp", "term": "Two-tier ERP", "definition": "Running a large system at head office and a lighter one in subsidiaries or newly acquired businesses, with the smaller entities reporting up rather than being migrated onto the corporate platform. It trades the cost and disruption of a full rollout for the work of keeping two systems in step.", "whyItMatters": "The integration is the whole risk, so ask precisely what flows upward — trial balance only, or transactional detail — how often, and who owns the mapping when the subsidiary changes its own chart of accounts.", "seeAlso": "multi-entity-consolidation; legal-entity; total-cost-of-ownership; chart-of-accounts", "modules": "financial-management; business-intelligence" }, { "slug": "uptime-sla", "term": "Uptime SLA", "definition": "The contractual availability commitment, with the measurement window, the exclusions for maintenance, and the remedy when it is missed.", "whyItMatters": "Read the exclusions and the measurement window, because a high percentage measured monthly with generous maintenance windows can permit a bad day every month.", "seeAlso": "service-credit; recovery-objectives; disaster-recovery; managed-services", "modules": "ai-features" }, { "slug": "usage-based-billing", "term": "Usage-based billing", "definition": "Charging by measured consumption — transactions, users, storage, calls — with rating rules, tiers and commitments applied to metered data before an invoice is produced.", "whyItMatters": "Ask how usage data arrives, how disputes about it are handled, and how a rating error is corrected after invoicing, because rating mistakes are visible to every customer at once.", "seeAlso": "subscription-billing; tiered-pricing; revenue-recognition", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "user-acceptance-testing", "term": "User acceptance testing", "definition": "The stage where the people who will actually use the system run their own real processes through the configured build and say whether it works, as against the implementer demonstrating that it does. Scripts are written from the business's own scenarios, and defects found here are ranked and fixed before go-live.", "whyItMatters": "Contracts often tie a payment milestone to acceptance, so agree in advance who signs it off and what severity of open defect is allowed to pass — otherwise the pressure to sign arrives at the same moment as the cutover date.", "seeAlso": "cutover; implementation-partner; data-migration", "modules": "project-management; quality-management" }, { "slug": "utilisation-rate", "term": "Utilisation rate", "definition": "The share of a person's available time spent on billable or productive work. Definitions vary in what counts as available, which makes cross-company comparison unreliable.", "whyItMatters": "Ask how the denominator is defined and whether it can be changed, because a utilisation number whose basis is unclear is used to manage people and should be defensible.", "seeAlso": "billable-hours; timesheet; project-costing; time-and-materials", "modules": "project-management; hr-payroll" }, { "slug": "variance-analysis", "term": "Variance analysis", "definition": "Explaining the difference between two sets of numbers — actual against budget, this period against last, forecast against actual — by decomposing it into drivers such as price, volume and mix.", "whyItMatters": "Ask whether commentary can be captured against a variance inside the system, since the explanation is the deliverable and it is usually written in an email nobody can find later.", "seeAlso": "flux-analysis; management-reporting; income-statement; standard-costing", "modules": "financial-management; business-intelligence" }, { "slug": "vat", "term": "VAT", "definition": "Value-added tax: a consumption tax charged at each stage of supply, where a business charges it on sales, reclaims it on purchases, and pays over the difference. Rates, exemptions and filing rules are national.", "whyItMatters": "Ask how the system determines the rate on a transaction and whether the logic is maintained by the vendor per country, because tax determination written as configuration by a partner is yours to maintain forever.", "seeAlso": "gst; sales-and-use-tax; tax-determination; reverse-charge; tax-engine", "modules": "financial-management; localizations" }, { "slug": "virtual-card", "term": "Virtual card", "definition": "A single-use or merchant-locked card number issued for a specific payment or spend limit, used to pay suppliers or fund employee purchases with controls set before the transaction.", "whyItMatters": "Ask how card transactions and their receipts reach the ledger coded correctly, because the control benefit disappears if reconciliation is manual.", "seeAlso": "expense-report; spend-under-management; cash-application", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "walkthrough", "term": "Walkthrough", "definition": "Following one transaction end to end through a process with the people who perform it, to confirm the process works as documented. It is how auditors and implementers both find undocumented steps.", "whyItMatters": "Run one during selection using your own transaction rather than the vendor's script, because the steps a vendor leaves out of a demonstration are exactly the ones a walkthrough exposes.", "seeAlso": "test-of-design; internal-control; fit-gap-analysis; user-acceptance-testing", "modules": "financial-management; project-management" }, { "slug": "warehouse-management-system", "term": "Warehouse management system", "definition": "The system that directs physical movement inside a warehouse: putaway, picking, replenishment, packing and shipping, usually with barcode or voice devices. It may be a module of the ERP or a separate product integrated with it.", "whyItMatters": "Ask where the boundary sits between the ERP and the warehouse system for stock accuracy, because two systems each believing they own the balance is the most expensive integration mistake in this area.", "seeAlso": "stock-take; inventory-management-basics; three-way-matching", "modules": "warehouse-management; inventory-management" }, { "slug": "warranty-management", "term": "Warranty management", "definition": "Tracking what is covered, for how long, on which unit, and the cost of claims against it, including provisioning for expected future claims.", "whyItMatters": "Ask how claim cost feeds the warranty provision, because a provision estimated without claim history is a number the auditor will challenge every year.", "seeAlso": "serial-number-tracking; provision; field-service-management; corrective-action", "modules": "field-service; financial-management" }, { "slug": "webhook", "term": "Webhook", "definition": "A message the system sends to a URL you supply when something happens, so downstream software reacts to events instead of polling for changes.", "whyItMatters": "Ask what happens to a webhook when the receiver is down: retries, ordering and a replayable log are the difference between eventual consistency and silent data loss.", "seeAlso": "rest-api; ipaas; middleware", "modules": "ai-features" }, { "slug": "withholding-tax", "term": "Withholding tax", "definition": "Tax deducted at source from a payment — to a contractor, a licensor, a foreign supplier — and paid to the authority by the payer, who must also give the payee a certificate.", "whyItMatters": "Ask whether withholding is calculated at payment time with treaty rates and certificate production, since manual withholding produces both supplier disputes and penalties.", "seeAlso": "payment-run; tax-determination; transfer-pricing; statutory-filing", "modules": "financial-management; localizations" }, { "slug": "work-in-progress", "term": "Work in progress", "definition": "Value that has entered production but is not yet finished goods: materials issued, labour booked, overhead absorbed, sitting on the balance sheet until output is recorded. In services it is unbilled work on a project.", "whyItMatters": "Ask how the system proves the work-in-progress balance back to open orders or projects, because an unexplained balance here is one of the most common audit findings after a go-live.", "seeAlso": "work-order; standard-costing; percentage-of-completion; project-accounting", "modules": "manufacturing-management; project-management" }, { "slug": "work-order", "term": "Work order", "definition": "The instruction to make a specific quantity of something, carrying the materials to consume, the operations to perform, and the costs collected against it. It is the unit of work manufacturing accounting is built on.", "whyItMatters": "Ask how a partially completed order is valued at period end, since work in progress that the system cannot state is work in progress your auditor will ask about.", "seeAlso": "work-in-progress; bill-of-materials; routing; capacity-planning", "modules": "manufacturing-management" }, { "slug": "working-capital", "term": "Working capital", "definition": "The cash tied up in the operating cycle: receivables plus inventory less payables. Improving it means collecting sooner, holding less stock, or paying later, and each of those is a different team's job.", "whyItMatters": "Ask which working-capital metrics the system computes natively — days sales outstanding, days payable, inventory days — because a treasurer who has to rebuild them monthly in a spreadsheet will not trust them.", "seeAlso": "accounts-receivable; accounts-payable; inventory-turnover; cash-flow-statement", "modules": "financial-management; inventory-management" }, { "slug": "write-off", "term": "Write-off", "definition": "Removing a balance from the books when it will not be recovered or settled — an uncollectable receivable, obsolete stock, an abandoned asset. It is recognition of a loss that has already happened.", "whyItMatters": "Ask what approval a write-off requires by value and whether the reason is a required field, because write-off is the other route by which value leaves a company quietly.", "seeAlso": "bad-debt-provision; credit-memo; segregation-of-duties; audit-trail", "modules": "financial-management" }, { "slug": "xbrl", "term": "XBRL", "definition": "eXtensible Business Reporting Language: a tagging standard that makes financial statements machine-readable by mapping each figure to a defined concept in a taxonomy.", "whyItMatters": "Ask whether tagged output is generated from the reporting layer or produced by a filing agent, because tagging maintained separately from the statements drifts from them.", "seeAlso": "esef; statutory-reporting; statutory-filing", "modules": "financial-management; localizations" }, { "slug": "year-end-close", "term": "Year-end close", "definition": "The close that ends a fiscal year: the full monthly discipline plus tax provisioning, statutory adjustments, retained-earnings roll-forward and the opening balances of the new year.", "whyItMatters": "Ask to see the roll-forward and opening-balance generation in a demonstration, because a manual year-end roll is an error that repeats itself for twelve months.", "seeAlso": "fiscal-year; retained-earnings; opening-balance; hard-close", "modules": "financial-management" } ] }