Ok.. This one is really odd and I'm sure nobody in their right mind has seen it.. You'll have to bear with me -- I'm the lone guy that is reconciling ALL of calendar year 2005 starting this week for my old church who's trying to find someone to take over these duties which have languished for the past year (obviously). Anyway, so here's my problem.. I've got an entire year of data (Jan-Dec '05) entered into the system along with two months of 2006 entries (Jan-Feb 2006) for checks & contributions. So, I push the Post Transactions button in the "Fund Accounting" menu expecting to see nothing (as I had already worked a little on January late last year so nothing new should need to be posted).. What do I see, but a handful of contributions and two months worth of checks.
Luckily I had my data directory backed up so I just shutdown PC8, restored it and re-started PC8. In perusing the unposted transactions, I found all of the items being posted had accounting months listed as "0601" NOT "0501"..
What does this mean? This to me means that us poor chaps that have to reconcile data that is REALLY old can't actually do it without having 2006 entries show up in the 2005 which wouldn't look to good.. Aside from ditching the Jan/Feb entries and re-entering them later, what are my options? I'd really rather NOT go down that path.. Can we please get this fixed? I'd hazard a guess that this bug probably exists in PC9 as well since it's a rare enough set of circumstances to run across..
In my case, my biggest problem is that the church wants this task completed ASAP which I'm not sure is going to happen..
To work around this, go ahead and finish entering everything for 0501 and 0502 and close those months. Then, you can enter transactions for 0601 and 0602, and they will just sit there until you've closed 2005. The problem, as you've discovered, is that in posting 0501, you also posted 0601 - it's just looking at the month. Normally, that's not a problem, but what you're doing isn't normal. This issue actually is fixed in v9.
Actually, this type of situation would be really easy to handle in v9. The accounting months are handled differently now, and you can have up to 12 months open at one time. You could have the entire year of 2005 open, and move back and forth between months. You could post to Jan 2005, then to August 2005, then May 2005 or whatever you need. Of course, if you are working in Jan 2005, you couldn't access Jan 2006, but you could once you close Jan 2005.
Prior to version 9, a user could change the accounting year at any time by going to File -> Preference -> Accounting Setup. Also prior to version 9, the fund accounting module only handled the current year of data. ie only 2005 detail transactions could be in the system. When you closed the year, the program kept totals for the prior year, but not the detail.
Given these 2 facts, the program ignores the year prior of the fiscal month. So in situations like you mention if you have 0501 & 0601 unosted at the same time, the system will post them both since it is looking at only the 01 portion of the field.
This is a very rare case and most people would not have over a year unposted at anyone time. If you are that far behind, I wouldn't do a years worth of data entry and then try to post and reconcile, I would enter one month, post, make sure it balance, then move on to the next month, etc.
Zaphod wrote:To work around this, go ahead and finish entering everything for 0501 and 0502 and close those months. Then, you can enter transactions for 0601 and 0602, and they will just sit there until you've closed 2005. The problem, as you've discovered, is that in posting 0501, you also posted 0601 - it's just looking at the month. Normally, that's not a problem, but what you're doing isn't normal. This issue actually is fixed in v9.
In my case, all of the data for 2005 is already in and Jan/Feb 2006 are also in (contribs, payroll, accts payable, etc).. If I post them, isn't the Jan/Feb 2006 entries (correct me if I'm wrong) going to show up on my Jan 2005/Feb 2005 reports as income/expenses?
Jeff wrote:Also prior to version 9, the fund accounting module only handled the current year of data. ie only 2005 detail transactions could be in the system. When you closed the year, the program kept totals for the prior year, but not the detail.
Ahh.. That would explain why I get no data when I run a report for calendar year 2004 since the data has effectively been purged for the most part. If you upgrade to PC9, do you get that data back or is it really gone (and not just hidden)?
In order to keep the detail, you would have to upgrade to version before you closed the year. In version 8.5 and prior the data is removed from the tables when you closed the year and there is no way to retrieve it.
Jeff wrote:In order to keep the detail, you would have to upgrade to version before you closed the year. In version 8.5 and prior the data is removed from the tables when you closed the year and there is no way to retrieve it.
Ok.. Just to make sure I'm following.. I'd need to move up to v9 in order to preserve the prior years data -- v8.5 won't get me that feature.. (I'm currently using v8 if I hadn't mentioned that already). TIA
Jeff wrote:In order to keep the detail, you would have to upgrade to version before you closed the year. In version 8.5 and prior the data is removed from the tables when you closed the year and there is no way to retrieve it.
Ok.. Just to make sure I'm following.. I'd need to move up to v9 in order to preserve the prior years data -- v8.5 won't get me that feature.. (I'm currently using v8 if I hadn't mentioned that already). TIA
That's correct ... v.9 is the first version that allowed prior years to remain in the system.
Zaphod wrote:Actually, this type of situation would be really easy to handle in v9. The accounting months are handled differently now, and you can have up to 12 months open at one time. You could have the entire year of 2005 open, and move back and forth between months. You could post to Jan 2005, then to August 2005, then May 2005 or whatever you need. Of course, if you are working in Jan 2005, you couldn't access Jan 2006, but you could once you close Jan 2005.
Ok.. Let me take this one step further.. Since we're on v8 right now, IF I were to move up to v9 today (for hypthetical purposes) and have my data converted to the new database format required by v9, would my current posting problem go away -- meaning that IF I did all this and did a "post transactions", the 2006 entries would not actually get posted as part of the "current" period (0501)? IF that's the case, and I dediced to move up to v9 and to expedite things, could I call over to you all and pay via CC and then get some sort of download so I wouldn't have to wait until next week to get my physical copy of the media/manual? As I'm sure you're aware, I'm being hounded upon to get this done asap, and after working with it last night, I'm not really liking the 2006 posted data showing up on my 2005 reports as it's going to make my life painful when I do reporting afterwards.. Anyway, just thought I'd ask..
Zaphod wrote:Actually, this type of situation would be really easy to handle in v9. The accounting months are handled differently now, and you can have up to 12 months open at one time. You could have the entire year of 2005 open, and move back and forth between months. You could post to Jan 2005, then to August 2005, then May 2005 or whatever you need. Of course, if you are working in Jan 2005, you couldn't access Jan 2006, but you could once you close Jan 2005.
Ok.. Let me take this one step further.. Since we're on v8 right now, IF I were to move up to v9 today (for hypthetical purposes) and have my data converted to the new database format required by v9, would my current posting problem go away -- meaning that IF I did all this and did a "post transactions", the 2006 entries would not actually get posted as part of the "current" period (0501)? IF that's the case, and I dediced to move up to v9 and to expedite things, could I call over to you all and pay via CC and then get some sort of download so I wouldn't have to wait until next week to get my physical copy of the media/manual? As I'm sure you're aware, I'm being hounded upon to get this done asap, and after working with it last night, I'm not really liking the 2006 posted data showing up on my 2005 reports as it's going to make my life painful when I do reporting afterwards.. Anyway, just thought I'd ask..
Thanks!
Version 9 gives you the capability to select what you want posted. However, I don't believe V9 is available as a download, but they can get it to you via expedited delivery service.
