ACQNET: RE - Negative encumbrances in III Millenium

Date: Fri, 15 Sep 2000 10:40:26 -0400
From: Norm Desmarais <normd_at_postoffice.providence.edu>
Subject: RE - negative encumbrances in III Millenium

Thank you to all who responded to my query about negative encumbrances. 
Several people encountered the same problem in the character-based module 
and nobody knows why this occurs. One person had had ongoing communications 
with III about this issue for two years and got no satisfactory explanation.

While nobody from III responded to the query or to the helpdesk message, my 
analysis points to the corruption of the Payment History File. When an 
invoice gets interrupted in processing, it appears that the Payment History 
File gets corrupted. While we never encountered this problem with the 
character-based module, virtually every invoice we processed with the 
Millennium Acquisitions module got hung up in a system seizure, time out, 
or some other delay/interruption. Not only did this lock the invoice, it 
required re-processing it, as not all payments were recorded. With the 
corruption of the Payment History File, we found some order records had no 
payment information even though doing an invoice check indicated they had 
been paid.

As I suspected, the negative encumbrances were only the "tip of the 
iceberg."  Over the past two days, my assistant and I examined and 
double-checked all expenditures and encumbrances for the current fiscal 
year and re-calculated everything manually. We found discrepancies that 
amounted to several thousand dollars.

I adjusted all the fund balances and ran a Fund Activity Report. However, 
after completing the report, the system reported that 9 funds were out of 
balance (it was more like 16) and would not clear the Payment History File. 
That had to be done manually. I also monitored the fund statements at 
various stages of the process to make sure everything resulted in the 
proper figures.

We worked with the Millennium Acquisitions module for three weeks in August 
and have since returned to the character-based module.