The administration of a company is always associated with a certain flow of tasks and work. In a typical trading company, items are purchased from a group of suppliers, goods are received and put into stock, sales orders are processed, stock levels are checked, goods are shipped and invoices issued, and payments are made and received. All transactions are logged and recorded, and financial events are recorded in the accounting subsystem.

A modern financial system like Hansa is designed to automate as many administrative tasks as possible. If information is entered in one part of the system, there should be no need to enter it again elsewhere. Information should be recorded for re-use, and it should be available throughout the system.

The above illustration shows a simplified description of the interaction of functions and information (messages) in a traditional trading business. The basic physical flow is shown at the bottom, with "operative" functions handling the goods as they are received, stocked and shipped. The rectangles above the operative flow are "administrative" functions that handle the flow of information in the business. The smaller rectangles are messages containing information that is passed around in the business. The dashed frame is the boundary of the business: although Suppliers and Customers are on the outside, there is an continuous exchange of information with them.

One of the tasks of the administration is to keep the organisation's "memory". This is done with the help of files and registers, where information about business events is kept. The following picture shows the same structure as above, but the messages have been removed and are replaced by the registers kept by the business.

Hansa's modular design provides a number of standardised tasks for each functional area in a business. The design is very flexible, so that many different types of business can use the software. In Hansa it is always possible to access information immediately from another module. If for example the person involved with Purchase Invoices needs some information about a Sales Invoice, then it is immediately available to them without any need to leave the system (subject to the person having the necessary access rights).

Hansa is an integrated accounting system. The different parts of the system interact with each other. The Sales Ledger is for example integrated with the Nominal Ledger so that as soon as an Invoice has been approved, all ledgers in the company's accounts are automatically updated. This interaction is immediate, and covers the entire accounting system. All registers, ledgers and reports are updated for all users.

In many cases, this integration means that you, the user, will not notice the actual creation of Nominal Ledger Transactions from the Sales and Purchase Ledgers. These Transactions constitute about 80% of the Nominal Ledger transactions in a manual system - you simply can forget them, together with all the hassle of reconciling the ledgers with each other. Hansa does all this automatically. The picture below illustrates the integration process.

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