Re: Financial Orders

On an earlier version of BPCS, we did things which may or may not be supported on your version.
* We found that the GL supported detail, summary, and an in-between, which functioned a bit differently for different kinds of input to journals. We ran tests at each setting, documented what was involved, then selected what degree was desirable for different kinds of transactions. Some needed detail for auditors, some we were happy to dig into detail from the source transactions.
* In some cases, the in-between contained reference info in GL Journal detail transactions, which correlated with cust #, vendor #, item #, invoice #, PO#, and other info from the source transactions. We clone modified one of the GL report programs to show this reference info, labeled as to what it was, and linked to the source which had not yet been purged.
* We found ways to sub-divide transactions, so each sub-category got its own GL Journal prefix, avoiding need to summarize. This involved inventory transaction types in ITE and special classes in IIC. The in-between for inventory transactions had separate batches down to reason code.
* Someone went into the maintenance at end of each week, to change the journal prefix for the next week's activity. Over the course of a month, the same activity had 4 contiguous journal prefixes, each of them with less journals than the ceiling for the month. In theory, this could have been a daily chore, since we had not found any ceiling on the number of journal prefixes, other than letters in the alphabet and numbers. We never explored special characters for this purpose. In theory, this could have been an automated program, triggered from menu or scheduler, as opposed to a human doing the maintenance.
* When a journal blew up, because more than 100 journals had come into existence in the same month, in an unexpected un-planned category, we were able to do maintenance to the blown up journal, to change its prefix so it was contiguous to correct prefix, but one not used for any other purpose. Combined with other actions, this meant nothing got lost or out of balance.
* We located a field in a file which had the journal ids issued, and the year & period, so we could then write a query to provide a count of how many created so far by journal, to see if something was on track to blow up, before it actually blew up, so we could take action about that in advance.

Alister Wm Macintyre (Al Mac)
Retired in 2015, after over 50 years in IT.