Information Systems:STM - Statements

Overview

ASW does open item statements; we wanted to do balance forward as well. Also we do statements twice a month.

The statement files keep history, so any statement can be reprinted. Statements can also be regenerated at any time. The program uses the settlement file to determine transaction balances as of any statement date. The opening balance of a statement is the closing balance of the previous statement. If a transactions is entered that should have printed on a previous statement (or a date is changed), then the opening balance will be incorrect. We will know this, because after the statement file is generated, but before it is printed we compare the totals to ASW. The fix for this is to regenerate the statement that should have had the new or changed transaction, and every statement since.

It was taking longer and longer to generate the statement file – up to three hours. The reason was that the balance forward statement generation program (ARRST002) was calculating the remaining balance of each transaction (all the way back to January 29, 2005) before deciding whether or not to show it on the statement (transactions due to be settled within the next 15 days). November 2013 this was changed to determine the remaining balance only for transactions to be included on the statement.

The open item statement generation program (ARRST003) was also calculating the remaining balance of each transaction back to January 29, 2005 to determine whether or not it should be on the statement (which is every transaction with an outstanding balance). In November 2013, this program was changed to start looking at January 2009, as the oldest outstanding transaction was in 2009.

Now it takes about 10 to 20 minutes for balance forward statements, and 5 to 10 minutes for open item; depending on how busy the system is. The change to the balance forward statements made the biggest impact, as they include all shareholders, and so is by far the largest volume of transactions.

Program and Files

- File ARSTTYP (STM - Customer Statement Format Types) tells which type of statement each customer gets.

- File ARSTHDP (STM - Statement Header File) is the name, address, date, and totals for each statement created.

- File ARSTBAP (STM - Statement Balances File) contains statement section totals, ie. for Invoices, credit notes, payments, etc).

- File ARSTLIP (STM - Statement Lines File) is the information for every transaction on the statement. (Note that for ‘open item’ it will contain all open transactions as of the statement date. For ‘balance forward’ it will be all transactions due within the next statement period – if they were due in the current statement period they would already be overdue.)

- Program ARRST002 (STM - Create Statement Records - Balance Forward).

- Program ARRST003 (STM - Create Statement Records - Open Item).

- Program ARRST051 (STM - Print Statement).

Posting to ASW

Regarding the Statements extension, further development was done by Sheila to automate the posting of EFT transactions to ASW. These functions/commands are found in View Statement Control Periods. More info can be found here

Other notes

This page (and the topic of statements in general) needs a lot of documentation and the info will need to be structured. Until that time, useful info will be written here as bullet points. -norwizzle (talk) 16:40, 26 February 2018 (PST)

• Statement runs are done via statement control periods.

• Regarding statement generation, there are two account types and two schedule types, leading to 4 potential permutations.

• The two account types are B - Balance-forward, and O - Open-item.
• The two schedule types modes are BA - Bimonthly Automatic, and MM - Monthly Manual.
• The 2 types are sometimes confused e.g. a customer that is Balance-forward is assumed to also have a bi-monthly automatic schedule. But upon last checking, there are instances of all 4 permutations. When troubleshooting the Statements extension for a problem that occurred as a result of a change to one of the types, make sure you know what exactly was changed.

• 'RG' - Regenerate is used often in Accounting to fix a statement for a store (recalculate). Note that this function can also be run for the entire statement control period.

Troubleshooting

• If statements don't run, check that the next period exists. If it doesn't, add one. In July 2021, this happened, and the program CRTSTMTS appears to run successfully, even using run.