... is CAL software
Helping students to cope with all aspects of national and intenational accounting in the field of economics is the domaine of ACTAS: browse through the relevant system of accounts, explore their contents, look for entries and corresponding cross entries, enter transaction values and observe their impact on main aggregates such as GDP, generate charts for time series or structural analyses etc. Brief yourself on the accounting principles by hiding details of the accounting system (compress/hide accounts, leave out subentries). ACTAS comes with an authoring tool allowing teachers to design exercices (combination of accounting events and transaction values) and a corresponding training interface that students can use to check their knowledge. All this makes it a real accounting assistent for computer assisted learning (CAL).
... covers international standards
Real world accounting systems are the backbone of ACTAS. For national accounting the latest ESA-standard (European System of Accounts, published in 1995 by the statistical office of the EU, EUROSTAT) has been implemented. ESA 1995 is the European version of SNA 1993 (System of National Accounts, published in 1993 by the United Nations). Since 1999 ESA is the binding framework upon all EU member countries.
As far as the balance of payments system is concerned, ACTAS follows the BPM5 guidelines (Balance of Payments Manual 5, published by the IMF in 1993) which makes it compatible with the balance of payments systems of most countries. National extensions/modifications are allowed by BPM5. As far as the German balance of payments is concerned we plan to allow for the specifications of the Deutsche Bundesbank in the near future.
... stays in touch with official data sources
Filling accounting systems with real world data is the final end of doing (inter-)national accounting. In order to give ACTAS users a feeling for the real data we cooperate with official data sources such as the Federal Statistical Office Germany (Statistisches Bundesamt) or the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and publish their results in the data section of this website. As ACTAS follows international standards of transaction coding you can easily import these data files (usually excel files) with the ACTAS import functions.
... comes with COM-server technology
Run ACTAS as a COM-server and control the accounting functions via a client application. The macroeconomic simulation software MAKROMAT makes use of this function to show its model-driven results within a realistic accounting scheme. This makes it easier for students to see which quantities can be explained by model-based theories and which can not. In short we shall publish the entire interface documentation on Documents-page of this site.
... speakes your language
While the clearly arranged user interface is in English only, ACTAS offers the specific contents (account, sector, and transaction names) in
English
German
French
Spanish (forthcoming)
... is evaluated
ACTAS reached the finals of the European Academic Software Award 2002. Read what the jurors said about it.