I love a good mystery. As I kid, I would read Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys or Ellery Queen. Who would have thought that reading those novels in the early days would have been training for working with Visual ERP? They helped hone my investigative skills. Now, my days are filled with mysteries. I thought I would share.
Mystery #1
Client – “I have WIP journals posting to my Customer Deposit account. Why?”
Well that did seem odd. I had a look at their database and sure enough there was a WIP posting. But I noticed there was also postings from Purchase Journals, Bank Adjustments and General Journal Entries. So what was happening? Any guesses? Just in case, you love a mystery too.
I looked at the GL Interface Table and sure enough the Customer Deposit account was referred as the Service Receipt Accrual.
Here’s how the service receipt account works:
PURCHASE JOURNAL – Dr. Service Receipt Accrual, Cr. Purchase Receipt AccrualWIP JOURNAL Dr. WIP, Cr. Service Receipt Accrual
The PUR journals should always equal the WIP. Thus the account nets to zero.
I looked at the account number and it was immediately after the Purchase Receipt Accrual. Another indication that at one time it was called Service Receipt Accrual. My suspicion is that a new account was needed for Customer Deposits and it looked like the Service Receipt Accrual wasn’t being used because it had a balance of zero. Rather than set up a new account, the account was renamed. Very environmentally conscious (reduce, reuse, recycle.)
Mystery #2
Client – “Help!! My Inventory Valuation Report shows $2.5 million but the Inventory Balance report shows $1 million. It’s month-end and it needs to be fixed.”
First thing, we confirmed that Costing Utilities and Manufacturing Journals had been created for the month. The next step was to run the utility “Recalculate Inventory Balances” (under Costing Tools) to repopulate the table for the month-end date. Sure enough, that fixed it. The original cause of the “disappearing inventory records” was likely using Costing Tools without having creating the journals for the current month. The reason, I know this one is because, I did it quite a few times before I figured I was the guilty party.
Mystery #3
Client – “I am trying to post the payments in payables. It shows there are 7 entries, however when I go to post and review the payments they are not there. Any thoughts?”
If you go to file, Print GL Transactions the payments will show. However, the payments have not been printed and thus cannot be posted to the General Ledger. Also, just an FYI, the 7 shown in the test close reopen period represents the # of lines not the # of payments. So, it might only be a couple of payments.
No wonder I love my job. It is almost as good as an Ellery Queen mystery.
