Suppress check printing for $0.01 checks

Hi,

We have an auto feed of a file of check requests for customer returns. Because of rounding, there are always many requests in this file for penny ($0.01) checks. We would like to suppress printing these checks but I can't find a way in Lawson to do this. We are hoping this will not require a new program to eliminate these checks from the file before it is processed.

Thank you,

Pam

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Infor Lawson Financials Group - Discussion

Comments

unknown

One penny is still money. This is an unacceptable error. Whatever system is feeding this information may be creating other accounting anomalies elsewhere due to rounding. Fractional cents add up to big dollars. You may want to begin investigating now, before an auditor catches the errors and trouble occurs.

(I believe that this may be happening because some genius has convinced their supervisors that an accounting system can be written in a non-COBOL language. The kind that has rounding errors because it does binary math, not true accounting math. In my early years I laughed off little one-cent rounding errors, until one day a bookkeeper lambasted me about my attitude. "A penny is a penny," she told me. It was unacceptable to be even one cent off, she insisted. I changed my attitude and it has helped me a lot over the ensuing years, especially with auditors.)

unknown

I completely agree with you. If we can find a way to suppress these checks we would want some kind of report (maybe we would need to write a query) as these checks still need to be accounted for. Just wanted to streamline the process of printing the checks then going thru the motions to clear them out of Lawson. These checks come from a system far upstream from Lawson and the cost of making the change there is high. Perhaps the real question is how can we eliminate them from the file once they have been imported into Lawson. Then we could report on that and make the proper accounting entries.

unknown

All I can think of is this: UNIX-style scripting can do it here. If the incoming file is momentarily placed in a directory somewhere for processing; and if it's a CSV file with one line per record; and if the 'bad' data looks like, ",0.01,"; then, a script could execute the grep command to create a new file without the "bad" entries. Grep can be used with the "-v" flag to capture only the lines that DO NOT match, meaning, you'll eliminate the bad lines. Then process the new, cleaned-up file, and all is well.

unknown

Thank you. I will take this suggestion to our technical team. Normally these types of files are placed in a folder where they are available for pre processing. We don't like to touch our production data files, but if we build in sufficient controls and reporting we may be ok.

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