h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I have a software-related question- hopefully there are other hootooers out there who use the application.

My company uses J.D. Edwards OneWorld for accounting purposes. Our Accounts Payable department use it to enter payment vouchers and issue checks. They've been using this system for about 4-5 years, and for the duration of this time have encountered a "problem" while entering multiple payment vouchers for separate payments to a single payee. Our A/P supervisor and the IT person in charge of development have been trying to figure out what causes it, and they can't. So I thought I'd see if anyone here has experienced the same issue, and if so, was able to resolve it.

When entering a series of invoices in sequential order by invoice number, using the same payee ID number, one would expect that the payments would be issued in order as well. But this doesn't always happen. More often than not, when the checks print, they print in random order. Since our A/P associates usually attach or include a remittance slip with each check, it would make their work quicker and easier if their checks were to print in order by invoice number, the way they were entered, rather than having to shuffle through a stack of payments (sometimes 100 or more) to match them up again.

Does anyone have any idea what might cause this issue, or how to tweak the system so that payments to a single payee are always printed in the same order which the invoices were entered?

Don't you have some sort of support & maintenance service contract for the application software?

If you can't pin it on your IT supplier, then I'd try (in this order) JD Edwards themselves, then internet user forums.

Sorry I can't be more specific in your case - I know more about Oracle Financials.

Internet user forums- there's a good idea. Well, duh! Thanks for pointing me in the right direction.

I don't know all of the ins and outs of our service contract(s); I work on the accounting side, not in IT. But after all these years it would seem that whoever is contracted to provide support has thus far been unable to pinpoint the cause/possible workaround for the issue.

Still- internet user forums would be a great place to start. Off I go.

Sorry if any/all of this is obvious, but I don't know your situation in detail.

It's worth knowing the terms of your service contract. Your help desk should be able to tell you, or if not, then they should know who is the manager responsible. You would normally be able to raise a support call, be given a call/ticket number, and know what its priority/severity is, how long it should take for a techie to respond, and how long it should take them to fix it.

Most IT service contracts have provision for you to 'escalate' a problem to a higher priority if it's causing problems to a business process.

One further thing to remember is that you may already be paying lots of money for IT people to sit on their backsides doing nothing.

Oh, our lovely IT people aren't the problem- my office is located right next to the CIO's office and she and I have discussed this previously. Typically, our help desk/ trouble tickets are used by our employees out in the field- corporate employees at management or executive level just ask the CIO for her help directly. Our CIO and Development Director have contacted someone at JDE in the past and been told it's just "one of those things" and there's no way around that... but I remain hopeful.

(That said, I appreciate the suggestion to start with IT, as in most circumstances they'd be in the best position to help- but they've gotten no answers from the PeopleSoft or Oracle people and at this point we're just trying to find an internal workaround. Since I have a lighter workload than say, our budget manager or the operations accounting manager, I thought I'd take the initiative to do a little moonlight investigating on my own... )