Upgrade Issue with Project Accounting and Purchase Order

This week I had an interesting issue pop up after an upgrade from GP9 to GP10. We have done many upgrades at this point, including ones involving project accounting, so this issue was a surprise and makes me wonder what caused it.

There were no errors during the upgrade, but post upgrade a user noticed that there were no longer any account numbers on purchase order line items. When she went to receive the purchase orders, the receipts did not default a Cost of Goods Sold account since there was no account on the line item on the purchase order. All of their purchase orders are project purchase orders, with projects and cost categories on the line items.

I looked in the database, and sure enough, in the POP10110 there were no values for the INVINDX field which stores the account index for PO lines. None. Zero. Zilch. Nada. For 7500 lines. To make sure I was not going crazy, I manually entered a purchase order and sure enough, the INVINDX populated fine. So then, to make sure it was an upgrade issue, I restored a backup from GP9 (when I knew POs and receipts were functioning, and accounts were defaulting). And in GP9, the INVINDX was blank as well.

So...I started to wonder if perhaps this was somehow related to the feature pack and changes made to the line item functionality with regards to accounts in purchase order. I still do not know for sure, but it seems like a likely reason (feel free to share if you know, or can disqualify this theory).

But I still needed to fix the issue, so I looked in the PA10601, the PA Purchase Order Line table. And the PACogs_Idx field was still populated. I checked my test purchase order that I had entered, to make sure that it populated both POP10110.INVINDX and PA10601.PACogs_Idx with the same values to make sure I was not making a bad assumption. Then it was easy enough to do a join on the PO number and ORD fields in order to update the POP10110 with the correct account index.

All is well now, and the user is able to enter and post (with accounts defaulting). Anyone else come across this?

Forecaster Sections and Accounts

In Forecaster, you can design Lines (also referred to as Line Sets) to represent the accounts that should be displayed in an input set or in on a report. These lines can then be assigned to cost centers for input sets, so when a particular department (e.g., Accounting) accesses their input set to enter or review their budget, only the accounts applicable to the selected department are displayed. This concept of assigning lines to specific cost centers is referred to as an "override" on the input set.

The applicable paths we have discussed so far in Forecaster:

• Build>>Lines
• Build>>Reports or Report Worksheet
• Setup>>Budgets>>Input Set>>Overrides

Additionally, you can set up Sections (Setup>>Budgets>>Sections). Sections are just that..section headers, and can be added to lines for input sets or reports, to label a particular section and to help with the presentation of the data.

So...why am I telling you all this? Well, last week I had a client with a strangest issue. In their input set, a particular account was showing with the wrong label. We deleted the account, re-added it. Same result. Wrong label. We made sure the label was correct on the account as well as in the line set. Same result. All users and workstations had the same issue. Argh.

At a loss, I started a case. We stared at the issue some more. We decided to install the latest service pack. But before we had a chance....EUREKA! The just happened to notice that she had a Section with the same ID value as the account that was being problematic. So, the input set was confused and was pulling the label from the Segment although it was presenting data and saving like an account.

Just wanted to share this little nugget of experience, so that you can spare yourself the time we spent to find it :)