Reporting financial information by line of business or by geographical area

The objective of this blueprint is to outline the requirements for Segment Reporting in OpenERP.

A business segment is a distinguishable part of the company that delivers an in-
dividual product or service or a group of products or services, which is subject to
risks and returns that are different from other business segments. A geographical
segment is a distinguishable part of the company that delivers products or services
within a particular economic environment that is subject to risks and returns that
are different from those of components operating in other economic environ-
ments.

It is a requirement of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) to
provide financial information by line of business and geographical areas to clearly
identify the opportunities and risks in these areas, which is known as segment
reporting compliance (IAS 14). This compliance applies to companies whose equity
and debt securities are publicly traded and to enterprises in the process of issuing
securities to the public. In addition, any enterprise voluntarily providing segment
information should comply with the requirements of the standard.

An entity that has determined that its operating segments are based on its products and services then it does
not need to provide geographical segment information.

Scope for version 1
---------------------------
- Create, change, delete segments
- Segments are not hierarchical
- Segments are are recorded at Journal Item Level, and are a required field.
- Segments are derived in business transactions from the Analytic Account. Therefore the analytic account is required field for expense and profit items, and for customer and supplier invoices.
- In transactions where analytic account is not indicated, a default segment is derived.
- Define a tool to allocate postings to different segments based on a distribution rule (e.g. percentage)
- The Profit and Loss reports information split by segment

Example:

In the posting of a supplier invoice the following journal items are posted:

Account
-------------
Vendor
- Credit:118
Expense
- Debit: 100
VAT (18%)
- Debit: 18

In case that the user would use segments, the results would be:
Segment | Account
-------------------------------
SEG1 Vendor
- Credit:118
SEG1 Expense
- Debit:100
SEG1 VAT (18%)
Debit:18

Scope for future versions
--------------------------------------
- In case of analytic distributions (module purchase_analytic_plans) the journal items are split for each segment associated to the derived analytic accounts.
- Include segment reporting in other financial reports (e.g. balance sheet)