Re: 405CD - Billing SNAFU

Sorry I was slow to see this thread ... we are in midst of EOWx2 EOM EOQ EOY
with physical inventory, and changing costs for the year. Some stuff is not
in balance. This gets distracting.

If you try to fix period end dates after that date has passed, you are
inviting chaos for General Ledger thanks to anything posted in a period
before you change the period dates.

For example, you shut down Dec-22 for the holidays, where anything after
that is a new fiscal period, then someone just has to post something for
Dec-27 which goes into a new fiscal period, then decision is made to fix it,
into same fiscal period as Dec-22, after it is in the wrong fiscal period.
Safe way to handle that is via a series of GL adjustments. But someone
wants to cover it up from the auditors, so the mess is made worse.

Another variation is the people who do end fiscal were told they could do so
over Christmas weekend, and you get end fiscal completed, then someone
decides some transaction absolutely has to go into December fiscal. This
can be done by back dating the transaction into the fiscal period which
ended before Christmas, and rerunning end fiscal reports which now have the
wrong totals, but people forget how to do that, and do not use back dating.

BBH never has any records in 405 CD
BBH is used in other versions of BPCS but not 405 CD
BBL holds records from shipping, corresponding to the B transaction in ITH,
for items shipped but not yet billed.

If the billing process runs correctly, BBL is used first to generate the
printable invoices, then to add records to invoice files SIH SIL receivables
RAR, input for GL, update order fulfillment, etc. There's accounting
reports, and at the end of the process BBL gets cleared of what got billed.

Some of this may be sensitive to work station side, where if someone starts
the process on one work station address, they need to go all the way on the
same side, plus the work stations have to have legal identities for BPCS.

There's some data area which is named using the first 6-8 characters of the
work station-id with some letters slapped in front for whatever series of
steps going on for billing. This is a work area which clears itself when
the process gets to a successful conclusion. If there's stuff still in
there from a prior crash, trying to run the process again from scratch can
lead to duplicated activity ... the activity in the work area, and what gets
added to it again.

Another way to screw up the process is when there are steps 1 2 3 4 etc. to
send some early steps to JOBQ, then without waiting until they get done, run
a later step interactively.

We recently had a screwup where after generating a printed invoice, that
invoice # missing from invoice file, A/R, G/L, accounting reports. My
speculation is that while the file update step running, someone signed onto
the order for that invoice, in violation of our rule that everyone else stay
off BPCS updates while Billing and daily post to GL running.
-
Al Mac
-----Original Message-----
From: bpcs-l-bounces+macwheel99=wowway.com@xxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:bpcs-l-bounces+macwheel99=wowway.com@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Don
Cavaiani
Sent: Tuesday, December 28, 2010 12:52 PM
To: bpcs-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [BPCS-L] 405CD - Billing SNAFU

We had some kind of an issue with period end dates - then a billing
program was cancelled. Now, we show "Shipped but not billed" and cannot
get the Billing program to select any records.

When running BIL500, we get message "No records found starting at
entered search argument".

I found that many of the 14 or so records in the billing batch has the
"IN USE" = Y in ECH - which I reset to blanks.

I also messed with a data area BLBIL561C changing a value from 'Y' to
'N'.

We also found that BBL has the records - BUT THAT BBH had nothing in it
??

I blanked out BBL, but still will not select anything.

Any Clues ???