Accounting Software Design Patterns [closed]

Answer 1

FOR UI / REPORTING: Look into Crystal Reports and Business Objects. Both are used at my place of employment in the Investment Accounting department.

We use other stuff for the internals here (JD Edwards) but I can't really go into much detail other than 'yeah, it does that'

Answer 2

Martin Fowler's Analysis Patterns covers some of those topics.

Answer 3

I would have the following structural classes:

1. Account - Represents a financial account. eg. Cash, Sale, Expense;
2. Category - The category where the Account belongs to. eg. Asset, Expenses, Revenues;
3. Mutation - Represents a financial entry of an account.
4. Transaction - Contains a collection of mutations.
5. Money - A composite class using Currency object and storing amount as long integer;

When I approached the design initially I kept thinking about Decorator and Builder Patterns. Tax calculation can use the Strategy Pattern. Observer Pattern can be used to veto Transaction.

Answer 4

A while ago when I was assigned to work on such a system, I found this link in the Martin Fowler website:

Martin Fowler - Accounting Patterns

It contais some patterns for accounting software, such as accounting entries, transactions and adjustments. The architecture he describes is based on events. Never read it entirely, as the system I work on was already in the middle of its development stage and I couldn't change the design.

Hope it helps.

Answer 5

I find the Data Model Resource book to be a good source of inspiration for modeling business structures. Apache Ofbiz ERP was built around the concepts in this book.

Answer 6

I can Recommend Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture and Analysis Patterns, Reusable Object Models both by Martin Fowler they give software architectural patterns to common problems.