Troubleshooting NEOSYS Finance System

Cross-Year Cross Check Balance Errors

When you use Opening Balance Journals, NEOSYS does not guarantee that the opening balances of one year match the closing balance of a prior year. This occurs quite normally and commonly occurs in two situations described below.

Regardless of the cause, in such cases, any statement or ledger account of movements (not open items) that crosses the disjoint years will have a "cross check balance" note at the bottom of the account. A cross check balance error is just a warning that the closing balance of the account (as calculated from a simple total of the opening balance in the old year plus all transactions) does not agree with the actual account balance according to the trial balance in the new year.

If the opening balance of the account in the second year is not equal to the closing balance in the prior year then logically the two years cannot be viewed as a single continuous account and agree with the trial balance.

Producing Historical Accounts

When you start up a company in one year using Opening Balance Journals then the closing balances of the prior years remain zero. If you thereafter start to post into prior years, the closing balances of those years will remain in disagreement with the opening balance of the following years.

Opening Balance Journals

If you post Opening Balance Journals into one year for any reason, they are not posted into prior years. Therefore the opening balances of the amended year become different from the prior year.

In this respect, auditors amendments to opening balances should be posted as normal journals in the final period of the prior year and not as Opening Balance Journals in the current year.

Solution

If you wish to obtain cross-year accounts between years, and you wish such account's balances to agree with the later year trial balance, then you must arrange for the closing balances of the prior years to agree with the opening balances of the following years.

To do this, ensure that any Opening Balance Journals that are posted into any particular year are also posted into all prior financial years of interest.

Editing and Reposting Vouchers

WARNING: Can cause effectively irreversible damage to the finance database requiring restoration of a suitable backup causing loss of data and/or total loss of database if backup not available.

It is almost impossible to edit and repost vouchers and keep the audit trail correct so this procedure is of limited use. The stages are UNPOST, EDIT, REPOST.

Must be done on test data and advisable to run CHK.VOUCHERS afterwards.

UNPOST

F5
UNPOST XXX*YYYYY*ZZZ

Where:

• XXX is the voucher type/journal code
• YYY is the voucher number
• ZZZ is the company code

Any problems with the voucher might generate messages but the problems will be reverse the problems which must have occurred when posting the voucher in the first place.

EDIT

F5
ED VOUCHERS XXX*YYYYY*ZZZ

For example, if due to a neosys system error, the ZZZ999 suspense account has been used instead of some missing internal system accounts like exchange gain/loss accounts then you can insert the correct account.

Change line 8 (which contains the account numbers) from:

REZO²REZO²BMDI²BMDI²²

to

REZO²REZO²BMDI²BMDI²EXDI²EXDI

where EXDI is the A/c No. of the Exchange Difference A/c.

F9, ESC to save and exit

REPOST

F5
REPOST XXX*YYYYY*ZZZ

Using Finance Maintenance Mode fixing tools

Do not do mass fixes eg “Add/Delete ALL xyz” options from a year in the past eg 2007 while only checking accounts for 2009. You must CHECK EVERYTHING THAT YOU REQUEST TO BE FIXED.

The various fixing tools like CHK.ALLOC etc are impossible to make safe in all circumstances so if you don’t really know what you are doing you assume the WORST not the BEST with these fixing tools.

CHECK EVERYTHING YOU “FIX”!!!

IF YOU DO NOT FOLLOW INSTRUCTIONS CAREFULLY YOU CAN END UP MODIFYING AUDITED ACCOUNTS AND IT WILL TAKE DAYS FOR PROGRAMMERS TO TRY AND CORRECT THE DAMAGE YOU CAUSE OR EVEN REQUIRE A RESTORE OF A BACKUP CAUSING LOSS OF MANY DAYS WORK TO THE CLIENT

Fixing "Cross Check Balance Error" message using CHK.ALLOC

Cross Check Balance error on an account means the total of the outstanding items in an account does not match the balance as in the movement - typically the outstanding shows a higher balance than the balance in the movement, but might not always be the case. The reasons why this may happen is because of the following:

• Reposting journals containing allocated items (which NEOSYS doesnt handle in all circumstances)
• Failing to clear open item accounts on a regular basis where the number of postings is high

This procedure only applies to CCB on the outstanding item type statements which are the more common problem. CCB on movement accounts are rarer, more serious and cannot be fixed by this procedure.

This might not always fix the CCB errors and hence you will need to escalate to the programmer.

!!! WARNING This is a dangerous procedure. IF YOU DO NOT FOLLOW INSTRUCTIONS CAREFULLY YOU CAN END UP MODIFYING AUDITED ACCOUNTS AND AUDITORS/ACCOUNTANTS AND IT WILL TAKE DAYS FOR PROGRAMMERS TO TRY AND CORRECT THE DAMAGE YOU CAUSE!

This can be run while other users are online.

DO THIS ON TESTDATA FIRST

This exact procedure restores vouchers missing from open item accounts. This can be caused by:

F5
UTIL (nothing happens at this stage as its a background process and gives you access to the next command)
CHK.ALLOC

Minimum voucher year.period?

Generally go back as little as possible to cover vouchers that might be missing from O/I accounts.

Which account do you want or blank for all?

You MUST press Esc to search for all accounts. Entering one account WILL NOT WORK since it will only check vouchers already on the open item accounts and we are looking for those that are missing.

IGNORE OR RESPOND NEGATIVELY to all messages or questions EXCEPT the following:

Missing from O/I index?

Select "Yes" or "Yes to all"

Meaning of other messages

The following message pair does not usually cause cross check balances and indicates that they have cancelled some foreign currency allocation since allocation should not cause and change in rate.

IN*175510*C 20/01/08 ALMA 4/2 REC*4440*C allocation base outstanding -7326.15 expected -6762.60 (-563.550,.08333333)
IN*175510*C 20/01/08 ALMA 4/2 REC*4440*C allocation changed exchange rate from .08333333 to .07692308

Following MUST choose "Leave all" otherwise risk damage to closed audited prior year accounts:

Account numbers do not agree. Delete the allocation?

Following MUST choose "Leave all" otherwise risk damage to closed audited prior year accounts:

Allocation is missing ?

Choose "Skip further Warnings" for the following message:

Amounts do not agree - please fix manually

Re-enabling CCB error mail notifications

NEOSYS is pre-configured to send out email notifications (to the same group of people who receive the backup alerts) when a Cross Check Balance (CCB) error is found for the first time on an account. That means there will be only 1 email notification irrespective of the times the error occurs until it is fixed.

After the CCB is fixed or after clearing or otherwise eliminating the same, you need to delete the CCB file in D:\neosys\neosys to re-enable NEOSYS to resend notification by email after it discovers CCB errors on that account again in the future.

Fixing "Cross Check Balance Error" message using CHK.INDEX

YOU MUST READ AND APPLY THE GENERAL INSTRUCTIONS WRITTEN FOR CHK.ALLOC AS WELL FOR CHK.INDEX

This program can fix a few errors that CHK.ALLOC cannot - including some in balance forward type accounts (ie not open item/outstanding item accounts) .

Not all the possible fixes are described here and any messages which are not described here should be responded to NEGATIVELY!

Different account - Delete the index entry?

  "*MEVEJ*FZ"  L=232 V=REC*461*FZ 05/07/09 B=447 "MEVEJ"
  different account "ADVOPME"
                     Delete the index entry?
───┬─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  1>No
  2│None
  3│Yes
  4│All

Select Yes.

Using CHK.POST to fix some types of Cross Check Balance (CCB) errors

This program adjusts the balances in the trial balance reports (which also show in the “Cross Check Balance phrase on the Detailed Ledger Accounts) to match the vouchers found in the voucher file. Note that CHK.ALLOC and CHK.INDEX have no effect on these figures and instead amend the transactions shown on the Detailed Ledger Account - and thereby the totals on the same report so that they agree with the CCB amount and thereby the conflict is resolved.

Most CCB in NEOSYS are related to problems on outstanding item accounts and are fixed with the CHK.ALLOC program. More rarely, problems occur in the movement accounts and are fixed with the CHK.INDEX program - although this can also fix some errors in outstanding item statements. Even more rarely will the problem be on the Trial Balances/CCB balances and can be fixed with this CHK.POST procedure

WARNING! This solution may make things worse so don’t use on live data unless EXHAUSTIVELY checked that everything is ok on test data first.

WARNING! Don’t go back and “correct” previous years which have been closed because auditors expect them never to change (EVEN IF THEY ARE WRONG!) and it can be impossible to put them back “wrong” if you “correct” them.

WARNING! If you correct previous years then you must rerun the Open New Year procedure for all prior years and this procedure is not documented and can only be run by programmers at the moment.

1. In maintenance mode press Alt+1
2. Enter the range of periods that you want to check/adjust the trial balance for e.g. 1/9-7/9 for 1st Period of 2009 up to the 7th period of 2009.
3. Press F9 and Esc
4. Press F5 and type CHK.POST
5. What stage to start at? Choose “Select Vouchers”
6. Clear the updated balances file? Choose “Clear it”
7. OK to Start? … OK
8. If there are any discrepancies found between the Trial Balance Balances/CCB balances … and the Vouchers in the file you will get some fairly cryptic questions asking you, one by one, if you want to fix the balances.

IMPORTANT

1. It is advised that you only fix the balances which refer to the accounts that you are concerned about. You will find the account number buried in the cryptic questions referred to above.
2. If you fix subsidiary account balances then MAKE SURE that you also fix the control accounts balances (if you are prompted).