Arthur Jochems (ajoc)
43f296177e
A recent feature in accounting (odoo#139225) introduces cross analytics, which allows submitting multiple accounts per line (one account per plan). This is not done, as would be assumed, by changing the `account_id` field from a Many2One to a Many2Many, but by adding fields to `account.analytic.line` every time a new root analytic plan is created. This approach has certain advantages, but a particular disadvantage is that it becomes harder to update existing lines. For MRP, updating rather unlink-recreating lines is important for employee time tracking, where the analytic line will be updated every time the time worked is updated, and the employee's wage can change between updates. In this edge case, the accumulated cost must remain calculated at the old wage, and newer costs must accumulate at the new, actual wage. Concurrent closing line edge case ================================ An analytic distribution assigns divides an expense into smaller expenses for analytic accounting. Typically, every fractional expense is credited to a different analytic account, and they total to 100% of the original expense. With multiple analytic plans, dividing that expense can happen different ways. For example, one analytic plan may track expenses per department, while another keeps track of expenses per region. This means that an analytic distribution may contain accounts belonging to different plans, with every plan dividing the original expense in different ways across its own accounts. For cross accounting, fractional expenses can be assigned simultaneously (i.e. on one line) to multiple accounts (up to one per analytic plan). In our example, this would mean that this fraction was spent by a specific department in a specific region. For an analytic distribution to be accurate, we must ensure that for every plan, the sum of all accounts come out to the total percentage (usually 100%) that was distributed in the first place. Because multiplying large numbers with small percentages can introduce rounding errors, we need to correct for any discrepancies. With one account per line, this is easy; when a line closes out one of the plans in an analytic distribution, we assign the exact outstanding amount for that plan to that line, ensuring that the sum across all accounts adds up to the exact total percentage of the expense that was divided in the first place. Since every plan closes out on a different line, we can apply this correction every time and the amounts are always correct across the entire analytic distribution. The problem with cross analytics, and thus multiple accounts per line, is that a line can now sometimes close out two different plans, with slightly different outstanding amounts. This means we can no longer guarantee that every plan in an analytic distribution sums out to the original expense. Luckily, only certain analytic distributions are vulnerable to this edge case: they must distribute across multiple plans, and must have at least one line where not all participating plans are credited. There exists no trivial way to fix this. The current implementation follows the approach of the accounting module, which takes no special precautions against this edge case. Part-of: odoo#146114 Task-3621105 Part-of: odoo/odoo#146114
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