Open Accounts Payable Using XMLSIE to publish accounts payable as open data

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• XMLSIE -> CSV
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• Excel -> XMLSIE
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The intended target for the technical documentation of this project is software developers. The text does however contain quite a bit of terms from the world of accounting, which might be unfamiliar to some. Therefor we’ve authored this small introduction to the subject.

Dictionary

Accounts payable

Debts to suppliers. Incoming invoices.

Ledger of accounts

A list of accounts in bookkeeping. An account represents an asset, a debt, an income or a cost.

A few commonly occuring accounts are:

• Bank account (asset)
• Personal deposits (debt)
• Sale of service (income)
• Office supplies (cost)

For a very small company it’s usually enough with 20-30 accounts, while a city might have several thousand.

A simplified explanation of accounts is a way to group transactions, e.g. allow one to see how much money is spent on salaries, for stamps or how much value added tax has been invoiced to customers.

You can read more about available accounts in the Swedish standard BAS-kontoplanen, used by the vast majority of all Swedish organizations.

Sole trader

The simplest form of company. A single individual person who has been trusted by the government to keep books and pay company taxes. There is no distinction between the economy of the idividual and the economy of the company, thus if the company of a sole trader goes bankrupt so does the individual.

In Sweden the organizational identity and VAT number of a sole trader is the same as social security number (personnummer) of the individual, and is therefor counted as personal data, data which isn’t always legal to publish.

Financial year

The bookkeeping of a compnay usualy span a year, a financial year. Such a year doesn’t have to but usually do match a calendar year January through December. In some cases, for instance when a company is formed, it is common that the first financal year is either shorter or longer than 12 months.

Journal entry

A verification is an economical event within a bookkeeping. The law require that one use so called double-entry bookkeeping system to register journal entries to show how funds have moved within the company. The sum of such a journal entry will always end up as 0.

Ledger entry

A journal entry can be broken down in ledger entries. In the above example there are 3 ledger entries.

Journal

As the name imply, journals are used to group journal entries. For example one could have a journal for incoming invoices, another for cash purchases, and a third for invoices sent to customers.

Supplier

Someone that sold a service or a product.

Payer

The customers. The receiver of a service or a product.

Invoice

An invoice is a request for payment, sent from supplier to the payer.