Accounts Production 10.2.3 (Update 45)

I trust this mail finds you well and fully recovered from the post World Cup blues. It's hard to believe that half of the year is already gone and that Spring is just around the corner.

Product Update
The last newsletter from the Accounts Production team was sent out in January and so much has happened since then.

Here are some of the highlights from previous releases: Group Company Consolidations The functionality is now available to consolidate any number of subsidiary ledgers into one ledger called a Consolidation Group ledger. The Consolidation process can either revise all open (unfinalised) periods or can be set to include all prior period adjustments into a specific period. Compacting of Entries Since ledger data in Accounts Production is stored indefinitely this can cause the ledgers to become quite big in size. This function allows prior period entries to be summarised which will in turn shrink the size of the ledger. Cumulative Update packages Previously each update package had to be loaded in sequence. The introduction of cumulative update packages allows the end user to "skip" some updates and e.g. jump from update 37 to 44. This greatly simplifies the process of updating the suite to the latest update. Single Environment A new "Lite" version of Accounts Production was made available aimed at the single user wanting to use the suite on a desktop computer or laptop. This new type of environment complements the existing Portable and Online environments supported by the system. Financial Statement Templates Financial statement templates for Trusts and Partnerships were released (based on Kenziks) The table below lists all the changes included in Update 45 for Accounts Production. Please refer to the public ftp site for the release notes for prior updates.

GENERAL Ref Details of changes 1. Multi Office Support The entire Accounts Production suite was altered to support a Multi Office Environment: The setting up and use of Account prefixes in the account chart is now supported. Office and Service Line Maintenance has been added. All batch posting, unposting and import functions now works in the context of an office. Transferring accounts from a Master/Member ledger to a ledger using account prefixes now allows for the target office, service line, etc. to be specified. The GreatForm reporting engine has been changed to allow the use of prefix masks on reports as well as on individual commands on the report. This allows for reporting to be done on a specific office, service line, etc. GreatAssets now allows asset registers to be configured per office 2. Changes to Client Installation Wizard A prompt was added to ask the user to confirm the password when capturing the SMTP authentication details. The perquisites check in the installation was changed to correctly handle scenarios where the underlying Dot Net framework function is unable to correctly retrieve the SQL instances installed on a machine.

GREATSOFT EXPLORER Ref Details of changes 3. Restore ledger fails with incorrect exception message The Restore ledger option in GreatSoft Explorer sometimes failed with a message saying that the backup is possibly corrupt or is not a backup of the ledger being restored. It was found that the actual exception that caused the Restore process to fail in most instances was related to security. Microsoft SQL Server imposes certain restrictions as to the location of the backup file being restored. The exception message was changed to correctly reflect the nature of the exception. 4. Issue when running GreatSoft Explorer for first time (Online Environment) An issue was corrected that caused the initializing process to fail on client machines when running GreatSoft Explorer for the first time in an “Online” environment. GREATLEDGER Ref Details of changes 5. Posting/Unposting prior period batches that contain Balance Forward accounts In the past the balancing forward of accounts was only handled when running the yearend balance forward routine.  The problem with this approach comes in when capturing batches in a previous financial year that contains accounts that are set to balance forward as the system was not doing the required balance forward adjustments to the current financial year. The posting and unposting routine has been changed to now correctly handle this kind of scenario. 6. Data Entry: Allow User Reference for all batch types When capturing a Payments batch an option is available that allows the user to supply a reference number which the system will then automatically increment for each subsequent entry. This functionality was extended to support all other types of batches including Receipts, Journals, Bank Statements and Initial Outstandings. 7. Data Entry: Entering tax amount when tax code not selected An issue was corrected that allowed the user to capture a tax amount without having supplied a tax code. When posting such a batch it causes the trial balance to go out of balance. 8. Trial balance out of balance after capturing Initial Outstandings and running Year End Balance Forward An issue was corrected that caused the Trial Balance to go out of balance after capturing an Initial Outstandings batch and then running the yearend balance forward process. The problem was that the Year End Balance Forward routine was not excluding Initial Outstandings entries when calculating the Profit and Loss for the year. 9. Batch posting fails with batches containing large nr of entries The batch posting routine was optimised to correctly handle the posting of very large batches containing 50 000 + entries. Batches of this size previously caused the posting process to ultimately timeout and fail. 10. Account Maintenance issues The following issues related to using Account Maintenance have been corrected: Clicking [New] to add a new account, followed by [Cancel] did not reselect the previously selected account in the grid. If validation fails when saving an account the account is still added to the grid. Clicking [New] to add a new account and then clicking [Close] to close the window displayed the following exception: “Object Reference not set to an instance of an object”. GREATFORM Ref Details of changes 11. Report Builder: “Fuzzy” Account lookup now allowed Some of the commands in the GreatForm Report Builder require that a From and To Account be specified. Previously this selector required that a valid existing account be selected when setting the From/To range. This selector has been changed to allow a “fuzzy” range to be specified. This allows a range to be specified that will cover a wider range of accounts than what is available in the chart of accounts when initially building the report.  12. Issues related to creating Cross Tab Layouts A fix was made to Layout Maintenance that caused the building of a cross tab layout to fail when using columns for which the header text was not specified.

Download Updates The latest updates and accompanying release notes can be downloaded from our ftp site ftp.greatsoft.co.za. Please log in and navigate to GreatSoft/AP10/Updates. A document entitled Which Update to Load is available in this folder which will indicate which updates you need to load in order to update your Accounts Production installation to the latest version as quickly as possible. A document entitled How to Update Accounts Production 10.2 is also available that explains the process of loading updates. Please note that you will need to be registered as a user first before you can access this site. To register as a user you can go to the same site and follow the instructions given there. Should you require a CD version of the software please contact the response centre with your shipping details and this will be mailed to you. Please feel free to contact the GreatSoft Team on 0861Great1 (0861 473281) or send an email to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it if you have any questions or feedback. 'Til next time Regards Johan Goosen