Research and development validating the underlying inventiveness and concepts of the subsequently patented ALAMS Ledger Updating System were done in a Unix environment in Fortran and C and ported to an MS DOS computer for testing and debugging. Thereafter, field-testing was done with approximately 100 small businesses in manufacturing, construction and assorted other industries.

The early research and development team from 1976 through to 1985 was composed of one programmer and two CPA's. One of the CPA's was the inventor.

From 1985 to 1991, the research and development team was composed of two CPA's and three programmers. In 1992, the research and development team was disbanded and field-testing was done through to 1999 with two CPA's and one tech support person.

Current advanced development is underway by Accounting Applications, Inc. who will be offering the Ledger Updating System as a web service on Microsoft .Net and also as middleware software components, which developers can integrate into their business applications.

The family of software components under advanced development all do the same thing, which is updating accounts in a ledger. Components, however, will differ one from another depending upon the type of ledger being maintained (e.g. receivables, payables, inventory, sales, etc), the number of accounts being maintained and how quickly the accounts are to be updated from the time a transaction is executed.

Benefits

Programming work is significantly simplified to do the account balance updating task for small and very large n-tier complex double-entry systems and the system can be implemented to update balances in real time for competitive business reasons and to more easily detect kiting, lapping and other fraudulent activities.

The Ledger Updating System is the ideal solution to account updating issues in a variety of stateless Internet and Intranet applications and facilitates more rapid program development and time to market by minimizing programming errors and by editing the rules table to accomplish the desired account updating result.

Executing from servers or workstations or both, the computer program retrieves symbols from a rules table in the form of XML data strings.  It compares them with symbols recorded in the transaction records of the transaction record set being processed and with symbols in the account records selected for processing. As a result of the comparison, either the units balances or money amount balances or both in the selected account records are automatically updated 100% of the time with 100% accuracy using the same logical thought processes as would be used by a skilled accountant.

The updating process includes a foolproof algorithm for adding to or subtracting from the account balances of the selected records based on (1) the account record's individual debit or credit designation and posting code, (2) the posting code designation of each transaction record in the set being processed and (3) the negative or positive designation of the unit and money amounts in the account and transaction records.

Auditable trial balances are produced by summing the totals of the balances of a specific ledger of subsidiary accounts (i.e. accounts receivable, accounts payable, etc.) and verifying from linked files the specific transaction details used by the program to update those balances and the general ledger control account balance maintained for that specific subsidiary ledger in order to locate a difference, if any, between the sum of the account balances in a specific subsidiary ledger with the balance of its corresponding general ledger control account.