RE: EOM Processing -- BPCS-L

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Short answer to Andrea = YES - if you leave GPM alone, and billing runs
with today's date, the Billing will go into NEXT month fiscal, whether it
was done before or after EOM.  Remember the "B" transaction for Billing was
ACTUALLY created in the SHIPPING steps.

The controlling stuff is the DATE in the transactions.  Your ITE file
dictates where they will end up in GLD, when someone runs GLD540 against
ITH transactions, in which the B transaction for Billing was populated by
the shipping process, so if you do not do the shipping and billing on the
same date, you could get pieces of the transaction set in different fiscal
periods.

In some of this I am guessing, because we have in the past had our BPCS
messed up seriously, figured out how it went wrong, and pledged policies to
avoid any future risks.

Andrea's fiscal month 11/01/02 and ends 11/30/02 is very similar to ours
... except we would not wait until Dec 2 to run our EOM ... we would
consider that to be EXTREMELY DANGEROUS because we have a full crew of
departments posting stuff Monday 12/01/02 and we cannot trust BPCS to
consistently post all of those transactions into the next fiscal.  That
system will not work for Physical Inventory for example, unless you are
able to prevent 100% of your staff from posting transactions that should
not be done between INV900 and Physical Inventory Completion.

We work on physical tags before EOM processing, but once a facility is
declared closed for physical, NO ONE is allowed to post any transactions to
it until the accounting side is declared completed.  This is because we
cannot trust everyone to know what kinds of transactions are safe and which
are not.

If you not muck with IBM date over-rides, and leave all BPCS fields
defaulting to today's date (whatever it is), then whether you run Billing
for 12/02 on Monday or Tuesday, it should make no difference, it will go
into the Fiscal period AFTER the one that ended 11/30/02.

Now a wrinkle on this ... sometimes people start a labor ticket batch in
the late afternoon, and finish it up the next working day.  The
transactions keyed on the previous day will be dated the previous day, even
though they not posted until the next working day.  We have put a stop to
this by running a Query/400 over the FLT member WORK and teaching
accounting how to hijack the work station of batch not taken to a conclusion.

Our rules of thumb, developed after many mishaps thanks to us not
understanding all the nuances.
    * Let's not do any date adjustments unless accounting department or IT
doing it deliberately to correct some kind of misposting.
    * If the transaction happened overnight or over weekend, and clerical
person posting it next morning, use date of next morning, when you actually
keying it in, unless accounting approves exception date.
    * When accounting plans end-fiscal ... always send MSG *ALL a few days
in advance to remind people when is end-month and to let CFO know when you
are in fact done with d your BPCS input work for the dept facility day (do
not send a message WE ARE ALL FINISHED because there may be other people in
your office who are not yet finished).
    * When we start semi-dedicated BPCS tasks, check who else is on the
system, not just WRKACTJOB but also discontinued stuff ... if there are
people working the factory 2nd shift, vary off their work stations for safety.
    * Billing is done every end day, invoices dated same day as shipping.
    * If we have a late nite shipment whose full details will not be known
until after normal clerical working hours (e.g. late nite trucking pick up
... we want air bill # on the invoice but we can't use pre-numbered one) we
post this as if it was actually done the next business day.
    * End of month, year, physical, etc. is done in evening, usually
started on a Friday, after 1st shift clerical people done for the day.
    * All transactions for that period are to be posted prior to the
evening of fiscal.
    * If anything cannot be done before fiscal, it will be done after
fiscal, carefully dated in the next fiscal period.
    * We need to periodically run lists of possible suspicious
transactions, because people who assume that everything will be done
correctly will tend to miss many mispostings.
    * Accounting needs to be aware of who MIGHT have posted transactions to
BPCS with dates crossing over physical or fiscal ... in practical terms
DSPLOG tells you who was on the system over the weekend, and GO POWER means
the system was actually OFF when no one authorized by accounting to be on it.


>We do have our company hold off on Billing the 1st day of the every month
>(at least billing anything that impacts A/R), we run all our M/E close jobs
>in the evening on the last day of the month except for ACR900, which we run
>the following night - for cash posting...
>
>DeeDee Virgei
>Nelson Stud Welding, Inc.
>7900 West Ridge Rd
>Elyria, OH 44036
>
>  -----Original Message-----
>From:   Andrea Hardiman [mailto:ahardiman@ridewellcorp.com]
>
>Al,
>
>Here's what I think you've written, please correct me if I'm wrong.
>
>Our fiscal month is the same as the physical month so the GPM file shows
>the period starts on 11/01/02 and ends 11/30/02.  So if I leave the
>dates alone (the billing program has today's date in the jobd) and the
>Accounting department had done the billing today those transactions
>WOULD NOT show up in November's numbers?  Am I understanding what you've
>written?
>
>Andrea

YES you correctly understanding what I was trying to say.

>-----Original Message-----
>From: Al Mac [mailto:macwheel99@sigecom.net]
>
>
>The question was asked about Billing.

>  It is also true for a grand panorama
>of other kinds of inventory transactions.

>Which fiscal month the data ends
>up in depends on the DATE used for the transactions.  They can be placed
>into current fiscal month, previous fiscal, future fiscal, or
>non-existant
>fiscal (like if someone makes a keying error when doing date overrides).
>
>As to your question ... if you post Billing before or after end-month,
>which fiscal will it end up in?
>
>It depends on the DATE used for the Billing.  By running IBM OS/400
>Change
>Job, you can make the computer think you keying in the data on some date
>other than when you really doing it.

<snip>

>We want our Invoices to be Dated the same day that we actually Shipped
>what is being Billed.
>
>We do not want to saddle our accounting department, or anyone else, with
>stuff that is not intuitively obvious.

<snip>

>We discovered this because we run reports off of Inventory Opening
>Balance
>multiplied by Cost with subtotals on warehouse and item type.  We
>discovered that Opening Balance changed after end fiscal, and traced it
>to transactions posted to the month that we just finished, after we
>finished the month.
>
><snip>
>
>Another file you might look at is FSC = Shop Calendar.
>You can make it not legal in BPCS terms to be doing certain types of
>transactions on a non-production day.  There's also a shipping calendar
>in DRP.
>
>Dee Dee wrote:
> >Hi Andrea,
> >
> >If you look at BPCS's Period Master (by using program GLD105 or by
> >displaying GPM file), you can see the beginning and ending date for
>each
> >period.  We use to have a 5/4/4 month closing schedule so we have done
> >billing in the beginning of December for November close...  Good luck.
> >
> >DeeDee Virgei
> >Nelson Stud Welding, Inc.
> >7900 West Ridge Rd
> >Elyria, OH 44036
> >
> >  -----Original Message-----
> >From:   Andrea Hardiman
> >
> >I'm using BPCS 405CD and have only 3 months experience with the
>product.
> >My company runs its month-end on the first business day of the new
> >month, so this evening EOM will run.  Question was asked of me today
> >that if the Accounting dept. did billing today, would that information
> >show up in November business or would it stay in December?  Not knowing
> >the answer, I asked them to postpone all billing until EOM was run.
> >Does it make a difference?
> >
> >I appreciate any help you can give.
> >
> >Andrea Hardiman
>
>Before posting, please take a moment to review the archives
>at http://archive.midrange.com/bpcs-l.

Al Macintyre
BPCS/400 Computer Janitor at http://www.globalwiretechnologies.com/
Al at home http://ryze.org/view.php?who=Al9Mac
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