We are regularly contacted by people who refer to their previous usage of “SunAccounts” as their finance system and “Systems Union” as the vendor or author. These tend to be senior finance managers and consulting advisory people of a certain age who are looking to replace their current financial system with the powerhouse system they remembered and trusted from a previous time. To refresh the memory...
SunAccounts encompassed:
- Ledger Accounting.
- Multi-company and multi-currency.
- Assist Register.
- Corporate Allocations.
The supporting module SunBusiness addressed:
- Sales Order Processing.
- Purchase Order Processing.
- Inventory Control.
SunAccounts pioneered the use of an integrated chart of accounts (also known as the uniledger or combined ledger), where there are no separate subledgers. Instead, each individual debtor and creditor is just defined as an account in a discrete range in the chart of accounts. The account numbers are appropriately coded so they can be easily extracted for processing and reporting. This completely removed the need for subledger reconciliation and brought a true single source of truth into the GL for the first time since the monks decentralised their trading activities in the 1490s!
SunAccounts also introduced the concept of a trading entity being both a debtor and a creditor at the same time. Hence being able to easily and quickly report on each as a consolidated single account, thereby eliminating the need for multiple accounts and the overhead of bringing them together in a contra account. This is very clever and a great benefit for organisations like insurance companies where customers paying policies may also be receiving compensation payouts.
The thing is, SunAccounts and SunBusiness no longer exist. In the late 90s these names were retired and the core business application is now named SunSystems.
In those days SunSystems was owned by the UK company Systems Union. In 2006 it was purchased by Infor (one of the world’s largest enterprise applications vendors like SAP and Oracle) and the solution is now known as Infor SunSystems. The solution has been enhanced and extended over the years with version 6.4 having been released in 2019.
