Administering the system
The finance run
Pre-flight validation, the faults it catches, and fixing each one from the link beside it.
On this page
A finance run turns what schools have bought into a file the council's finance system can read. It starts at the finance interface.
Pre-flight first
Before anything is generated, the screen validates every line that would go into it and shows what is wrong, grouped by fault, with a link beside each one to the screen that fixes it.
The four faults it catches most often:
| Fault | Fix |
|---|---|
| The school has no finance customer code | Set it on the organisation. |
| The order has no purchase order number where one is needed | Add it to the order from Finance. |
| The service has no cost centre or account code | Set it on the service at Services. |
| A line has a value of zero | Look at the order. A zero line is nearly always a mistake rather than a gift. |
Fix, then generate
Work the fault list to nothing, or exclude the lines you cannot fix today. An excluded line is not lost: it is held over and appears in the next run.
The whole point of doing it in this order is that a rejected file costs a morning and a fixed line costs a minute. Nothing is sent until you generate, and nothing is generated until you say so.
What a line carries
The order reference, the customer code, the description, the quantity, the net, the VAT, the cost centre, the account, the fiscal period and the transaction type. The exact columns and their order are set by you rather than compiled in: see interface formats, returns and the customer master.
The transaction type travels with the line rather than with the file, because one export legitimately carries an invoice and the credit note that reverses it.
Scheduling it
Schedules runs the export on a cycle, with a summary sent ahead of time so somebody can look at the fault list before it goes. That warning is the part worth keeping: an automatic run nobody looks at is how a month of bad customer codes reaches the ledger.
Card payments
A settled card payment is excluded from the run, so nothing is billed twice. That happens on settlement rather than on the attempt, which is why an order can briefly show as paid and still pending.
What has not been billed
The "sold but not yet billed" report at Reports is everything sold that has not reached a batch. Run it after each run: it should be short and it should be explicable.
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