Advanced Fund
Management Solutions

Removing and Importing Payroll Edit Values

You may have hundreds of edit values for some of your Payroll employee data items (a good example is .costcode, where you may have lots of departmental/grant/location choices). Not all of those edit values may be current. Many old ones may show up on the drop down list when you are entering time sheets. How would you like to scrub the list of out of date edit values and easily add all of the new ones you need? This article shows you how.

To remove old edit values, you must first remove them from all employees. Create a Payroll columnar report with two columns: an employee number column and a column that shows the data item's edit values. This will help you remove the edit values from the proper employees. You still won't be able to go to the Employee Data Items task in Setup and delete the edit values (the system will still show them as "in use"). Call us for how. Once you have deleted all of the edit values you don't need, you're ready to add new ones.

There is an import file that can import new edit values. The beauty of it is that you can create it in a spreadsheet much faster than you can add them manually (although, if you only have a few to add, it would be faster to do them manually). Below is a sample import file that imports two new edit values for .COSTCODE:

Grant1 is the edit value, Grant One is the name of the edit value (Lookup 1). Record type 03 is the second of a possible 10 lookup values. .COSTCODE uses only one additional lookup for the account mask. Below is the report you get after a successful import. Call us for details, it's easy!

Ask Judy...

Q I would like a report like the Account Detail report, but I need to select a range of numbers in one of my dimensions. Suggestions?

A Look under General Ledger/Accounts/Transactions. This feature allows you to report transactions by Account/Date/Transaction. If you enter a mask (even if all Xs), you may select a dimension and specify a range for the results. Data such as that on an Account Detail report is provided, and you may print it by using the "Print Grid" button.

Q We have about ten years of paid invoices in Accounts Payable. How can we get rid of about seven years of them?

A Go to Accounts Payable/Maintenance/Purge Paid Invoices. You will be able to purge paid invoices (they must be reconciled) up through a date you specify. Run this with the Preliminary switch to "Yes" the first time to see what will be purged, then do it for real. If you have never reconciled paid invoices, they will still be at stage 60. Contact us to help you change stage 60 to the reconciled stage so you can perform this task.

Copying Account Information

The Account Utilities feature gives us a number of ways to copy or modify more than one account at a time—a real time saver. Here we see how to use the "Copy Account Information" to update the descriptions from a source account (A000 7710-00 0), to all 7710 accounts in the chart of accounts. If account A000 7710-00 0 has the correct descriptions (names and capitalization, mainly), then all others in the chart of account will end up with them also!

You may select the source account for your updating by mask (as we show), but also by status and including and excluding by attribute. At the bottom of the form you may also update attached attributes, aliases and ID entry requirements.

Be careful with your selections, as you can accidentally rename, or modify, unintended accounts! It may be prudent to practice in a test division first.

Did You Know...?

General Ledger. Those of you using GLS018 to import transactions (and posting directly, without saving) may have noticed that the user number is not included on the resulting trace report. Since 7.4 SP2, transaction import program GLS017 has been available and will record the user number whether the import is saved, or not.

Payroll. When running Direct Deposit in Payroll, you will be generating a PYN or PY2 file for your financial institution as well as a PYSTUB file to print and give to your employees . If you forget to delete them from the Print Manger, you will get a message next time you produce checks that will warn you that those files are still present. In case you have not printed them, this gives you time to do so before the next check run overwrites them.

Advanced Financial Reporter. One of the reports in the list of AFR reports in Division 96 is called "Model". This report has only header commands and is intended as a starting point for a new report (header information shows at the top of every page and includes run date, page numbers, etc). In addition to helping you learn about header commands, create a copy of it for use as the basis of new reports in your live division.

Links to Other FundWare® Sources

There are several sources of information on the internet that can make your Fund-Ware® experience more productive and effective. Check out the following sites:

Fundware.com

This is Fundware's home page. On it you will find the latest in file fixes and program updates. In addition, you may search the knowledge base for answers to your support questions.

www.afmss.com

Check out my site for a complete listing of the products and services I offer.

www.20pines.com

This site offers a number of products that add an extra measure of functionality to FundWare®. One of these products may make your life a lot easier.

www.muhnconsulting.com

This site offers a number of free downloads that will help you get more out of Fund-Ware®.