Aged Debtors Report Problem

I was on site today to do a sales demo of a couple of new modules to an existing client. At the end of the demo, the new Head of Finance had a word with me about the Aged Debtors report which was not working correctly.

He showed me a copy of the report and all invoices, regardless of the transaction date, were showing in the Current Period. My first thought was that the Aging process (Microsoft Dynamics GP menu » Tools » Routine » Sales » Aging) had not been run; a hurried think for other options drew a blank.

This is a client who has been using Microsoft Dynamics GP since at least version 8.5, and perhaps even as far back as 7.5, so I was a little skeptical that this was the actual answer, but I couldn’t think of anything else.

I had a chat with the Head Of Finance and his colleague from Accounts Receivable, who I neither remembered meeting nor actually hearing her name before, and quickly realised that the problem was what I thought; no-one had been running the Aging process for quite a while.

Aging in Payables Management occurs without any user intervention but Receivables Management has a separate process which needs to be manually run before producing the Aged Debtors report. This particular client has has a few members of staff leave and be replaced by new people who were trained internally; and one of the people who had left was the person who had been running the Aging in Receivables Management.

They had not passed on any information about the need to run this process so the current members of this client’s finance department didn’t know it needed to be run. So an easy fix in the end; having shown them the screen, they’ll schedule this in with part of their standard period end process.

This is the sort of issue we have encountered at a few sites; only one user knows a particular job and when they leave problems occur as no-one else can fill the role.

Whenever I have organised training on site I have always advised that at least two people are trained up but the more the better.

One of our other clients rotates his team around the different roles every six to eight months; it not only keeps people fresh from working on new parts of the system but it also allows the knowledge to be spread around and prevents exactly this sort of problem.