General Ledger Automated Balancing

KFS General Ledger reports can be used to manually verify balance and entry totals processed through the nightly batch cycle. An automated balancing function simplifies this process and does much of the verification automatically. The process builds a series of entry and balance tables that are synched with your General Ledger as they are created. Thereafter, the process uses these history tables, adding transactions from each nightly batch cycle. It compares the calculated table amounts and row counts back to your General Ledger counts and balances. Discrepancies are reported along with summary statistics for row counts and errors.

The automated balancing report is generated by the posterBalancingJob, which may be run as part of your institution's nightly batch cycle. The report it generates is called 'balancing' and is available in the GL Reports directory.

The first time the automated balancing process is initiated, it populates entry and balance history tables. A message to this effect is displayed at the top of the report:

During the first run, the process builds the history tables that future runs of the process will use. From then on, each time the process generates the history tables, it includes entries from the most recent batch cycle.

Each run of the report generates statistics indicating the fiscal years included in the balancing along with summarized counts for each table verified and any comparison failures detected:

exclaim     Entries associated with other fiscal years will not be maintained in the history tables and will not be compared to the General Ledger tables.

All fields displayed in the statistics are detailed in the table below.

General Ledger Balancing Report Statistics fields

Statistic Label

Description

FISCAL YEARS INCLUDED IN BALANCING

Specifies the years included in the automated comparisons. The KFS-GL NUMBER_OF_PAST_FISCAL_YEARS_TO_INCLUDE parameter controls the number of past fiscal years included.

HISTORY TABLES INITIALIZED—UPDATES SKIPPED

For the first run of the posterBalancingJob, the value is 'Yes,' which indicates that the history tables required for future runs of the automated balancing report have been populated. During subsequent balancing (after the tables have been initialized), this value is 'No.'

OBSOLETE HISTORY DELETED

If a given fiscal year in the history tables is no longer within the range of years to be included in balancing, this entry indicates the fiscal years that have been removed. If no fiscal years were removed, the value is 'No.'

UPDATES SKIPPED DUE TO OUT OF RANGE FISCAL YEAR

If the most recent GL nightly batch cycle included entries for fiscal years that are not within the range of years to be included in balancing, this field indicates how many updates to the balancing tables were skipped due to out-of-range fiscal year entries.

GLEN AMOUNT FAILURES (EntryHistory)

The number of entries in the General Ledger Entry table that failed to match those in the entry history table.

GLBL AMOUNT FAILURES (BalanceHistory)

The number of entries in the General Ledger Balance table that failed to match those in the balance history table.

GLEN SUM (ROW COUNT) - CALC. (EntryHistory)

The calculated row count from the Entry History table. This number equals the number of entries in the history table prior to the last batch cycle plus the number of entries from that last cycle.

GLEN ROW COUNT - PROD.

The number of rows in the General Ledger Entry table. This value should match the GLEN SUM CALC row count from the History table.

GLBL ROW COUNT - CALC. (BalanceHistory)

The calculated row count from the Balance History table. This value equals the number of previous History table balance entries plus the number from the most recent batch cycle.

GLBL ROW COUNT - PROD.

The number of rows in the General Ledger Balance table. This number should match the GLBL ROW COUNT calculated from the history tables.

ACBL AMOUNT FAILURES (AccountBalanceHistory)

The number of rows in the Production Account Balance table with balance amounts that fail to match to those in the Account Balance History table.

GLEC AMOUNT FAILURES (EncumbranceHistory)

The number of rows in the Production General Ledger Encumbrance table with amounts that fail to match to those in the Encumbrance History table.

ACBL ROW COUNT - CALC. (AccountBalanceHistory)

The calculated row count from the Account Balance History table. This number equals the number of Previous History table account balance entries plus those from the most recent batch cycle.

ACBL ROW COUNT - PROD.

The row count from the Production Account Balance table. This should match the ACBL ROW COUNT calculated from the History table.

GLEC ROW COUNT - CALC. (EncumbranceHistory)

The calculated row count from the Encumbrance History table. This number equals the number of the previous Encumbrance History table entries plus the number from the most recent batch cycle.

GLEC ROW COUNT - PROD.

The row count from the Production Encumbrance table. This should match the GLEC ROW COUNT calculated from the History table.

Errors encountered by the automated balancing process are displayed before the statistics. An error section is displayed for each history table that failed to balance. Detail is displayed for each error, up to the configurable maximum number of errors for the report.

pencil-small     The KFS-GL NUMBER_OF_COMPARISON_FAILURES_TO_PRINT_PER_REPORT parameter controls the number of detailed comparison failures that can be printed. Your report always includes the total number of errors, but details are shown only up to the number of errors specified in this parameter.

Errors in the balancing should prompt you to investigate the other General Ledger batch reports to determine where the problem(s) might lie. After errors are corrected, synchronize the history table with your General Ledger. The posterBalancingHistorySyncJob can be run to re-synchronize the history tables to your General Ledger.

More:

Scheduling Year-End BatchJobs