Thursday, November 30, 2017

Two IMP things to remember before a presentation - from posting perspective

The reason to write this post is to take a not of a major disaster i faced while i was presenting the solution to bunch of individuals, who were supposed to test it later and ingrain that learning so that i never forget again.


Batch transfer rules



This small setting can take your presentation to an all together different disastrous path. I had my presentation planned in the afternoon and i tested the complex custom-built functionality since morning, thrice and it all worked perfect, the way it should. The postings were correct, the vouchers were correct, the accounting was correct. I tested the entire end-to-end process and i was so convinced that i would rock the presentation as i was confident about everything and i believed that i really have understood the process and i can deliver the same with that passion and energy. I started my presentation confidently and the moment i posted the first (expense) transaction, i just clicked on the voucher to show the users which accounts are debited and credited. When i clicked on the voucher, it was blank and i was so surprised and sad to see that. The functionality which was working 10 mins back, which i did test (and not once) since morning, what happened suddenly, i could not believe. But as i had previously posted transactions i continued. However i was depressed and my entire presentation was then carried out in a "not so good" manner, though i tried to save the situation by showing previously posted transactions, along with some wit and humor.

After the presentation was over, whilst we were technically trying to find out what must have gone wrong, the technical consultant, finally found out the cause. He said that within those 10 mins before presentation, someone changed the setting of the "Batch transfer rules" from SYNCHRONOUS to SCHEDULED BATCH. I knew this setting but i completely forgot when the fiasco happened in front of the audience. The biggest learning for me, from this incident is, always have a plan B ready, you never know what could go wrong, even if everything is tested and all is working before the presentation. Second most important thing which now i have made a mental note is, to always check for this parameter FIRST whenever i will not see a voucher for a posted transaction in future.

Posting Profile setup in parameters

I mostly work on the projects side of things in the application, hence sometimes you tend not to remember the settings in the other modules. And when that happens then you waste lot of time and energy investigating the issue related to that. "Posting Profile setup in parameters" is kind of basic setting for the people working in the 'Trade and logistics' space, but because projects span across many modules in AX and because you tend to focus more on the settings in that area, you need to forget this sometimes. Also because these settings are mostly done by other team, hence you tend to assume that the settings are in place and this then leads you to forget those settings. Enough of introduction now.

The customer and supplier posting profiles were all in place, with all the necessary accounts etc. even after that when i was processing the supplier invoice, i was getting this error:

"The transactions on the voucher XXXX do not balance as per . (accounting currency: $ - reporting currency: $ "

People working in AX domain will know that something is wrong either with posting profile or with exchange rate. I checked both (supplier posting profile) and all looked fine. The only thing i did not check was whether that same posting profile is configured / called in the parameters. Once that was done, the error was gone and it was all good. The learning for me this was, that not only to check the posting profiles but also to check whether they are called from the respective parameters.



The reason to write these trivial things down was to avoid re-inventing the wheel in future, if at all, i face another memory loss with respect to these settings and errors. :-)

Thanks
Sarang