My last post about the good and the ugly of the Update Budget Lines feature had a continuing theme to it. I was telling the story of the client who mass-updated 650+ projects with a new cost category only to find the budget sources set to Specific didn't get populated with the default "specific" GL account.
What I didn't get into was HOW they found the problem. I built some integrations for them for Misc Logs, which they've been using for a while now and have no issues with. It's been a huge time saver for them, and they love it. Great! So, fast forward to how they found out they had an issue during the Misc Log import and posting. The problem was, that eConnect didn't fail and alert them of the problem with the missing accounts, it allowed the creation of the transaction without GL distributions and they posted it without thinking to check! Uh oh x2!
This article is explaining the issue, another possible bug, in the Project Accounting Misc Log Entry eConnect node (not a problem with Misc Logs themselves).
The Issue
Normally, if you are typing in a transaction like a Misc Log entry, it's validating what you are selecting and it won't let you proceed with a Project and Cost Category combination if the budget line is in estimate or doesn't exist or has an account missing, etc.
The issue here is, that eConnect (I think) should do the same validation on import. It validates other things just fine, but in this particular case, it just creates the transaction without any notice of error to the user. Because it is missing an account, instead of creating a partial distribution which then would not post (due to being unbalanced), it simply doesn't create any! Excellent… that's fantastic! (slight sarcasm intended).
There are some situations where no distributions would exist for a transaction, they are rare but they can happen; because of this Project Accounting doesn't care if the distributions are empty, therefore it allowed the users to post the batches like normal. They do so many of these that they didn't bother to look at the edit list, they just posted. (note to readers: you don't have to physically print the edit list to view it and see if there are any glaring issues… better to take a couple of minutes before, than several minutes or hours later to fix a problem).
So, when they went to look at the results in the G/L, they were, of course, shocked to find no journal entry for a handful of transactions. They called me, I looked at it, and putting two and two together I realized we had two separate issues going on - Update Budget Lines didn't work as expected and no validation of the missing account occurred on the integration. Double whammy.
Here is what happens if they were to type this entry in: “Please set up the Specific Contra Account”.
In theory, eConnect should return an error when it tries to create this line with an equivalent error message but it did not.
This too appears to be a bug, and I'm investigating it also. What I haven't determined is if this is unique to this transaction type (most likely) or all Project eConnect transactions.
