Wednesday, May 14, 2008

What does that radio button do?

I try to be clever and/or funny by putting a cryptic title for my posts, I think it's my attempt to make Financial Software sound fun, perky and exciting (which it is of course). Probably the real result is for some people to get here from google (or Yahoo - do they still do search?) and be very disappointed, in fact they are probably hitting the back button right now. Wordpress can show me what searches people did that got them to my page and without going into the details let me tell you that my posts about the Intercompany Periods feature (why do I need another Period?) and my musings about clearing my desk to move office (Cleaning out my Closet?) have probably been read by many confused young people and I apologize to them if they are now here reading this too. Right now those of you who know this is a blog about Oracle Financials are probably wondering when they can stop skimming the preamble and I might get to something of use or interest, so without further ado...

I was working with some AGIS users creating an Intercompany transaction from the entry screen when somebody asked "What does that radio button do?" I realized nobody in the room fully understood the feature. Automatic distribution mode is essentially an aid to ease the amount of data entry you have to make. If you're creating a transaction batch with multiple transactions (ie. multiple recipients) you'll have a set of initiator (that will be you as you are entering the batch) accounting distributions for each of the transactions in the batch. Now if I have a batch with dozens or hundreds of transactions in and I want each of those transactions distributed to the same accounts, entering them manually against each transaction will take some time. So if I select automatic distribution mode you just enter your initiator distributions once and the batch header level and when you submit we will prorate those down to all teh transactions in the batch. So you can save a lot of key strokes entering transactions.

9 comments:

Meg Bear said...

We also laugh at some of the people who find our blog searching for entirely different things. Mark wrote a post about it actually

http://talentedapps.wordpress.com/2008/04/19/50th-post-milestone-reached-%e2%80%93-author-wins-olive-garden-gift-certificate/

- Meg

David Haimes said...

Meg,

I saw Mark's post, interesting reading. I saw you gave a gift certificate for the 50th post, now I see why I am not getting many people wanting to add to my blog - I expected them to do it for free!

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Tim said...

Interesting, now the cynic in me is telling me your broad and non Finapps related titles, just like my non-related reporting titles on my lil ol blog are just a means of phishing for page hits :0)

David Haimes said...

Tim,
I'm not that clever - I'm just trying to be amusing.
I think you're 'lil ol blog' as you modestly put it has become a phenomenal resource, it is packed with useful information that brings casual googlers and regular readers in large numbers. I'd be happy to get this blog even halfway to where yours is.

Does this job make my butt look big? « TalentedApps said...

[...] by Meg Bear on May 21, 2008 Thanks to David for reminding me that the blog title is important.  Just for the record, I am not covering that job you had that gave you an extra [...]

Scott Robinson said...

Well, *hopefully* the embedded help features in our future release might just help this.

It's been so entertaining over the years working in enterprise software where we find this case: I love when no one in the room can figure it out, you dig deeper, and find out it's there because some big customer needed/wanted some feature inserted into the base product ... but do they even use that functionality any longer??

David Haimes said...

Scott
We haven't done a good job documenting that feature. I remember it well and how it works, it was added after a customer focus group.... This particular customer always uses manual (the default) I have no statistics on who uses Automatic Vs Manual - any AGIS users out there feel free to comment.

evden eve izmir said...
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