GJ novice learns fast

[MacWheel99@xxxxxxx]

from Al Macintyre

405 CD V4R3 mixed mode - we ran our first end-month fiscal this weekend that 
was actually run in the year 00 & our users do not believe in testing, but 
they do believe in asking me to fix mess-ups.  1999 was also our first full 
year on 405 ... 1998 was 50-50 405 & S/36 multiple data bases, so we have not 
had prior experience in how much volume to expect in a fiscal year.  
Unfortunately I am a total novice in General Ledger Journal but I learn fast.

Accounting has several thousand GJW journal source codes (e.g. IN1207) which 
will not post because GJH already has a header on that code.  I ran a query 
to select all GJW records whose journal identification matched one already in 
GJH & I found IN1207 out there, from the beginning of the 1999 fiscal year.  
I also found a lot of tiny GJW batches dated 2000-2-7 with different IN####.

By GJW & GJH time the journal reference was 6 positions alpha.

Suppose I wrote a quick & dirty RPG SQL program to take IN#### in GJW which 
have a match in GJH, then change the field to INA### in which the letters A-J 
substituted for the digits 0-9 to give the field something unique that BPCS 
would not assign ... is this going to work downstream, or does GLD 
subsequently put the IN#### back into #### numeric field?  I recognize this 
will not solve whatever error they made to create the mess in the first 
place, but I think it should clear up the thousands of journals they cannot 
post right now.

It seems to me, from only a few hours of looking at this mess, that some 
mechanism assigns the next journal #, in a cycle of IN0000 to IN9999 then 
re-assigns the same # again, so that if they post 5 days a week 52 weeks a 
year for each of 4 facilities of inventory excluding holidays, they are going 
to run out of unique journal entries.

One of the accountants speculated that someone might have been posting 
inventory transactions to whatever file at the same time as they were posting 
inventory to Gen Led, much like the problems Billing has if Shipping is 
making some final corrections after they "said" they were done for the day 
... now we have people posting inventory all day long at all sites & the 
first they would have posted Mon Feb-7 would have been from the factory 
workers who were in on Sat Feb-5 ,,, now I did not get done with EOM until 
the wee hours of Fri nite, so it is possible I dated some EOM step as Feb-5 
when I should have made it Feb-4.  So one question is if there is any 
conflict between accounting posting inventory transactions to General Ledger 
at the same time as ordinary inventory input, and what date do relevant 
programs use when people leave their display stations on perpetually with no 
sign off.

I also saw on DSPMSG QSYSOPR where one of the accountants had cancelled 
GLD540 off of the JOBQ twice & the explanation given was ...
thanks to some PC installation that is in the works, the keyboard map for 
5250 emulation got "messed up" and the only person who knows how to do 
keyboard re-mapping on our staff is totally swamped with work, so the 
accountant is making some mistakes due to keys not being in the right places, 
like enter & field exit got reversed, and OOPS I did not mean to run that, so 
it was cancelled after it started running & I suspect that is part of the 
problem ... canceling an update job is not good business practice.  It would 
be nice if this accountant could use a different work station for 400 jobs & 
it will be interesting to see if the Payroll gets done right this week, since 
it comes from the same keyboard.

Question - Do companies normally post inventory transactions to General 
Ledger at what rate - daily, weekly, monthly?  Is this a task that needs to 
be done when no one is doing inventory transactions?

Question - What task should Accounting perform to make old GJH / GJD records 
go away, when they are done with them?  I do not know if they are in fact 
done with them.

Question - What program assigns new journal codes?  Does it go thru 0000-9999 
then create same #s again, or is there some kind of error message to user to 
say you cannot post this because you ran out of numbers? - you gotta purge 
some GL history before you can post more there.

Question - what key is unique in journal coding ... can it use the same 6 
characters again later in the year - is that what Ref1 Ref2 is for? ... I 
expect I may need to add a logical over this for my quick & dirty "fix."

Al Macintyre  ©¿©
http://www.cen-elec.com MIS Manager Programmer & Computer Janitor 
http://www.whma.org = our nitch industry

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