Wednesday, April 8, 2015

Why specify a Batch Number when importing bank transactions using eConnect?

By Steve Endow

A few weeks ago I delivered an automated eConnect integration to a client that imports vendors, AP vouchers, GL journal entries, and bank transactions.  This integration replaced several manual Integration Manager imports.

The new eConnect import worked well, but recently the client noticed that they had lots of CMTRX general ledger batches piling up, whereas before they just had one CMTRX batch in the GL for the bank transactions that they imported with Integration Manger.


The fact that the GL batches were piling up tells us, incidentally, that they have their Bank Transactions set to Post To, but not Post Through.  But they had set the option to Append GL transactions to an existing batch in the Posting Setup window.


So why is eConnect creating a separate GL batch for every Bank Transaction?

Good question.  I didn't know either.

On my Dynamics GP test machines, I normally have all of my batch types set to Post Through, as I don't want to deal with piles of GL batches after testing.  I speculate that most GP customers also use Post Through, so I don't see too many issues like this for customers that only use Post To.  So that explains why I would have never noticed the issue of lots of GL batches generated by my eConnect import.

So why is this happening?

I checked my eConnect code to see if there was some configuration option that controlled how the Bank Transactions were posted to the GL, but didn't see anything.  At first.

After some poking around, I finally noticed, to my surprise, that the eConnect Bank Transaction document type has a BACHNUMB parameter!


And even more surprising, the eConnect help file actually explains that the field is for the GL batch number.  Since Bank Transactions don't have batch numbers, I would have never thought to look for this field.

This is a pretty unusual feature for eConnect--but then the Bank Transaction, which doesn't use batches, is also a bit of an unusual transaction for Dynamics GP.  Rather than rely on the Bank Transaction posting settings to determine the GL batch name, eConnect lets you specify a batch number.  If you don't specify a value, it will create a new batch for every single bank transaction of you are using Post To.

My advice:  Specify the batch number.

Once I assigned a batch number of "CMTRX", all of the transactions posted to a single GL batch.

Go figure!

 Steve Endow is a Microsoft MVP for Dynamics GP and a Dynamics GP Certified IT Professional in Los Angeles.  He is the owner of Precipio Services, which provides Dynamics GP integrations, customizations, and automation solutions.

You can also find him on Google+ and Twitter





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