A

Accounting

The SunSystems Accounting module delivers Ledger Accounting and Budget & Commitment Control, while additional options for Corporate Allocations and Asset Register enhance the breadth of the offering. In addition, budgeting is brought under control with Budget Management.

Activity Based Costing (ABC)

A methodology that measures the cost and performance of activities, resources and cost objects. Resources are assigned to activities, then activities are assigned to cost objects based on their use. Activity Based Costing recognises the causal relationships of cost drivers to activities.

Alerts

A notification from an event that has exceeded a pre-defined threshold.

Analytic Applications

Applications that enable the user to take warehouse data and further manipulate it in order to make better-informed decisions. Examples could include demand forecasting, pricing, competitor analysis and customer segmentation.  Packaged software that meets three distinct conditions: process support, separation of function and time-oriented, integrated data Analytic applications expand the reach of business intelligence to an extended user base, packaging these technologies in a business context.

Asset Register

SunSystems offers an Asset Register option within its financial management software suite

B

Budgeting

SunSystems Budget Management enables the central collation and control of budget spreadsheets and manages all aspects of enterprise-wide budgeting, forecasting and planning

Business Activity Monitoring (BAM)

BAM is a business solution that is supported by an advanced technical infrastructure that enables rapid insight into new business strategies, the reduction of operating cost by real-time identification of issues and improved process performance.

Business Intelligence (BI)

BI is the process of providing critical information to corporate management to help them make better business decisions. It has become increasingly important with the growth in Web Sites that present a new source of information to be integrated with existing sources to enable management to obtain a comprehensive view of how their enterprises are performing.  The term Business Intelligence was used as early as September, 1996, when a Gartner Group report said: "By 2000, Information Democracy will emerge in forward-thinking enterprises, with Business Intelligence information and applications available broadly to employees, consultants, customers, suppliers, and the public. The key to thriving in a competitive marketplace is staying ahead of the competition. Making sound business decisions based on accurate and current information takes more than intuition. Data analysis, reporting, and query tools can help business users wade through a sea of data to synthesize valuable information from it - today these tools collectively fall into a category called Business Intelligence."   Business intelligence is actually an environment in which business users receive data that is reliable, consistent, understandable, easily manipulated and timely. With this data, business users are able to conduct analyses that yield overall understanding of where the business has been, where it is now and where it will be in the near future. Business intelligence serves two main purposes. It monitors the financial and operational health of the organization (reports, alerts, alarms, analysis tools, key performance indicators and dashboards). It also regulates the operation of the organization providing two- way integration with operational systems and information feedback analysis.

Business Performance Management (BPM)

Applications that help direct modelling or scenario exploration activities. Rather than simply exploring what happened and why, the application can help the user consider the implications of alternative courses of action before they become operational. Performance management suggests an explicit relationship to action, and modelling is the key link to do this.

C

Collaborative Commerce

To derive value across the whole enterprise, your systems need to share data - ultimately giving you all the information you need to power your business decisions. SunSystems provides a solution to this business challenge, allowing you to integrate solutions within your business to create an environment where commerce systems are working together, in collaboration.

Consolidation

SunSystems Consolidation delivers a powerful solution to streamline the processes of consolidation and management reporting. This application supports major international accounting standards (e.g. IAS, US GAAP) as well as European standards like UK GAAP or HGB. Additionally, management reporting options, such as evaluating actual, budget and forecast data, are fully integrated.

Corporate Accountability

The need for businesses to adhere to financial best practice and to provide greater transparency and accuracy in their financial reporting, in order to rebuild fragile investor confidence, promote new standards of corporate integrity, ensure compliance with stricter regulations and legislation and banish scandals such as Enron to the pages of history.

Corporate Allocations

SunSystems offers a Corporate Allocations option within its financial management software suite, supporting apportioned and fixed percentage allocations, fixed amounts and iterative charging, plus inter-company processing

Corporate Governance

The system by which business corporations are directed and controlled, specifying the rights and responsibilities of the board, managers, shareholders and other stakeholders. It lays down the rules and procedures for making decisions on corporate affairs, providing a structure for company objectives and performance monitoring.

Corporate Performance Management

Applications that provide support for specific KPIs (key performance indicators) enable a business to measure their performance. This is often coupled with comparative information from industry sources, so a company can compare their performance against that of others in their industry. Business performance measurement applications support the analysis phase of the business improvement cycle.

Cube

A data cube is a multidimensional structure that contains an aggregate value at each point, i.e., the result of applying an aggregate function to an underlying relation. Data cubes are used to implement online analytical processing (OLAP).

D

DSO

Days Sales Outstanding can be reduced to improve cashflow by using SunSystems Collect or SunSystems PSA for services billing

Data Dictionary

A database about data and database structures. A catalogue of all data elements, containing their names, structures, and information about their usage. A central location for metadata. Normally, data dictionaries are designed to store a limited set of available metadata, concentrating on the information relating to the data elements, databases, files and programs of implemented systems.

Data Integration

Pulling together and reconciling dispersed data for analytic purposes that organizations have maintained in multiple, heterogeneous systems. Data needs to be accessed and extracted, moved and loaded, validated and cleaned, and standardized and transformed.

Data Mining

The practice of extracting data from a data warehouse in order to analyse patterns, trends and relationships.

Data Modelling

A method used to define and analyze data requirements needed to support the business functions of an enterprise. These data requirements are recorded as a conceptual data model with associated data definitions. Data modelling defines the relationships between data elements and structures

Data Warehouse

An implementation of an informational database used to store sharable data sourced from an operational database-of-record. It is typically a subject database that allows users to tap into a company's vast store of operational data to track and respond to business trends and facilitate forecasting and planning efforts. A collection of data that is organized and optimized for distribution and access. Your business rules are applied to the data that is available through the data warehouse, which allows the data warehouse to provide data quality or "a single version of the truth."

Debtor Management

SunSystems Collect, for flexible account handling, superb credit management and debt collection

Desktop OLAP (DOLAP)

Desktop OLAP. Small OLAP products for local multidimensional analysis Desktop OLAP. There can be a mini multidimensional database (using Personal Express), or extraction of a datacube (using Business Objects).

Drill Down / drilldown Drill Up

A technique for navigating through levels of data ranging from the most summarized (up) to the most detailed (down). For example, to view the details of sales data by year, a user can drill down to display sales data by quarter and further to display data by month.

E

Performance management is an enterprise-wide program that provides a structured approach for deploying a company's strategy in a consistent and continuous manner. It gives an organization the capability to effectively communicate strategy and ensure that business processes are aligned to support the deployment of that strategy.

SunSystems Enterprise Planning offers a pre-built application to provide a sophisticated planning and forecasting environment that supports best practices like continuous budgeting and rolling forecasts.

An integrated suite of software modules, each of which provides departmental or functional support, but which also supports business processes across departments. It has proved very popular because of its degree of integration of both processes and management information. It has so far concentrated on internal 'back office' processes, requiring integration with customer relationship management applications. It is being extended outside the enterprise to embrace customers and suppliers. It is likely that it will merge with the customer relationship and supply chain optimisation markets.

F

Financial Accounting

The SunSystems Accounting module delivers Ledger Accounting and Budget & Commitment Control, while additional options for Corporate Allocations and Asset Register enhance the breadth of the offering. In addition, budgeting is brought under control with Budget Management.

Financial management is at the heart of almost every organizational decision and is dependent on data that is collected, measured, and analyzed from the business’s processes. SunSystems understands this and our financial modules are designed to provide you with immediate access to all your information, so that decisions can be made when they should be.

Forecasting

SunSystems Enterprise Planning offers a pre-built application to provide a sophisticated planning and forecasting environment that supports best practices like continuous budgeting and rolling forecasts.

G

H

Hospitality

MICROS-Fidelio and SunSystems offer an integrated front and back office solution for the hospitality markets. Our solution has empowered the management of some of the world's leading hotels, delivering a greater visibility of their operating performance and fuelling better, more informed decision-making. 

I

IAS

International Accounting Standards – the official IAS start date for quoted companies is for accounting periods after January 1st 2022

IFRS

International Financial Reporting Standards – the foundation of the reporting standards for IAS

Integration

The process of bringing together related information from different sources, so as to arrange it by customer. This may involve transactions with the same customer from different transaction processing systems, either because of different geographical locations or because different product groups have different systems. An example might be an insurance company that has separate departments, each with its own system, which sell life assurance, pensions, health, domestic and car insurance to the same customer. SunSystems uses SunSystems Connect to enable integration of SunSystems with your other business applications. This allows you to share core business data with web applications or portals, front office systems or other external applications.

Inventory Management

SunSystems provides the capability to manage inventory, ensuring full visibility of product, intermediate and raw material items, while also delivering lot and batch control. The Inventory module comprises Inventory Management and Inventory Traceability, with additional options, Costing, delivering Landed Costing and Cost Analysis, and Product Profiles. The solution enables greater control over inventory levels, without forfeiting essential customer service levels.

J

K

Key Performance Indicator (KPI)

A business calculation that allows macro level insights into the business process to manage profitability.

L

M

N