Over riding invoices going to the
wrong period to post due to carelessness of your business dates
As a user of Solomon, it was always gratifying to not have to worry about the transaction date when entering a transaction, because we could rely on the period to post field to determine which GL period was updated. This is still the general guideline, but this rule is not followed when printing invoices from Order Management. When I am in the Order Management Invoice printing screen, and I have forgotten to check the invoice date field and the date is in the next calendar month (ie 11/3/03) but the invoice really is an October GL transaction.
The date that shows up on the invoices is the same as the report date on this screen. Based on this report date, Solomon assigned the Sales Journal batch to a period to post matching this date. In the example above, where the report date field shows November 3, 2003, and you are really trying to process October 31st invoices and update the period to post for October, you will be frustrated because the period to post will be different. For a company with 12/31 year end, and 12 monthly periods, this invoice batch will be typically created for period November 03. This change started around Solomon version 5.0.
The simple fix is to always over ride the business date to the month you want the GL batch to go into. If you are like me, and sometimes get in a hurry, you find that you have posted this batch to the wrong period. As long as you have not posted this batch in the General Ledger, there is a back door option which you can use to easily fix this problem. This may require modification to your access rights, and this change should be restricted to senior accounting staff, in my opinion.
The fix is to change temporarily to the initialize mode. This is done by clicking on the options choose at the master menu.
From the drop down menus, choose the first item called: initialize mode. (Note: see your system manger if you do not have access to this area of Solomon). I like to re enter into this program and verify that there is a check mark by this option.
Next navigate Module > General Ledger > Journal transactions
When you go into this screen
(01.010), the first field Module is no longer grayed out. If you click
the combo button in the Module field, you will see all the modules (i.e.
Save your changes as you exit the Journal transaction screen. Re enter the Journal transaction screen and in the field called module, select the In or inventory module. Typically it will be necessary to change both the AR and the In batch back one period to post. After making the corrections for the inventory batch, save your changes and exit the Journal Transaction screen.
Next I want you to turn off initialize mode. This is done by clicking on the main menu choice: Option, then click on the menu choice: Initialize mode, causing the check mark to go away. Verify that you are not still in initialize mode by re clicking on the option menu.
Now when you post transactions, you will see the modified AR batch shows up as the current period.
Please note, that fixing the period to post this way breaks your audit trail. By this I mean, when the original AR and IN batch control reports were processed it showed that the period to post was 11/03, using the example screens above. We overrode at the GL Journal Transaction screen, that the period to post should be rolled back to 10/03. I recommend you find the original AR batch control report and annotate on this document what happened to the period to post. Everything else on the AR batch control report is correct.