Re: Small changes are better RE: Daylight savings time

On 2/27/06, Al Mac <macwheel99@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I usually do the hour change right after a backup.
>
> I recently had a situation where a shipment was made to a customer a week
> early in error, and the customer agreed to keep the shipment, provided the
> billing was as if it got shipped when it was supposed to.

Why not just ...
   -- issue a credit without inventory,and re-bill without inventory
on the desired date?
-- OR --
   -- extend the due date on the original invoice a week?

> I was able to get the system to do this, by several manipulations,
> including advancing the system date to when the shipment should have been
> made, then having the billing run, so the "corrected" dates into when
> receivables due and general ledger etc. (fortunately inside the same fiscal
> period), then putting the system date back to what it should be.

This is craziness.  Why didn't you just change the dates (using
DBU/DFU) of the billing and inventory transactions?  Given that it was
in the same period, it should have been fine.

> The users quite happy ... which is the case any time Al Mac does some
> "magic" to make data come out "right" without people having to do any real
> work to accomplish the goals.

It is one thing to work "magic" when something breaks, a program blows
up or a 5250 session disconnects or hangs up.  You are fixing a system
issue, and there really is no other way.  But using the back door
tools to correct user errors is not wise, since the system has
tools/process to back out transactions and execute them properly.

When I started here I had a programmer who would do that kind of
thing; correcting user errors using the back door so they were hidden.
The users loved him, but it drove me crazy.  I put a stop to it unless
there was a system problem.  It was amazing how quickly the careless
errors stopped happening, and I got back a couple of hours a week for
that programmer.

How many hours did you spend doing this and cleaning up the mess
afterward.  I bet it was in excess of 12 hours, which was far longer
than it would have taken the users to credit and re-bill.

> I would not be surprised if my action violated SOX.

Almost certainly it violated SOX; the question is if you broke any
other laws.  You have falsified business documents.

What if the customer refuses to pay the bill?  You can't prove that
you shipped on the real shipment date, and you can't prove that they
received the shipment that you created, because they didn't.

One of our jobs is to guard the integrity of the system.  If we sneak
around the system and make it lie, then by implication it can't be
trusted.  That is not a good thing.

--
Tom Jedrzejewicz
tomjedrz@xxxxxxxxx