Tuesday, February 3, 2015

The GL Account Link in Row % Combined with the Acct Mask Specified in the Reporting Tree do not Make Up a Valid GL Account

If you've followed this link and/or otherwise found this post, you are probably dealing with the following error:

"FRx Reporting Engine
The GL Account link in row % combined with the Acct Mask specified in the reporting tree do not make up a valid GL account. Verify that the link in the row format does not include mask characters (such as #, &, or -). If you are subtracting accounts, make sure that the subtracted account is included in parentheses. 
Account Mask in the tree: &&&&&????
Link in the row format: %
If you continue, this row will be left blank. Do you want to continue generating the report?"


KB966649

According to KB966649 This error is caused because the Viewpoint General Ledger is upgraded to Viewpoint 6.0.1 and the version of Microsoft FRx is not compatible with the newer Viewpoint version. Microsoft FRx version 6.7.9111 or above is only certified with Viewpoint 6.0.1.

PROBLEM - my client is already on 6.7.9111

Actual cause... account format mismatch!

Clues:

1. No Reporting Tree was in use.
2. The error occurred for the first and all subsequent rows in the row format.
3. The Report worked fine for another company/entity.
4. The Account mask referenced by the error was actually &&&?????

For the uninitiated, in FRx, account masks for account components/formats are & and ?

The & character is the substitute for any Main Account character and the ? character is the substitute for an sub-account character (a.k.a. wildcards).

The actual account format for this company should have been ???&&&&&, the first segment being location, the second being the main account; however, when the Account Format was initially configured for this company, the user accepted the default account settings, which made the Location segment the Main segment.  

In order to fix this, you need exclusive access to the database.  In Tools > Setup > Company > Account Format, choose the actual main account segment in the Main Segment drop-down list. You will be prompted to run Check Links maintenance on the Account Master file. I took the extra precaution of rebuilding the GL index in FRx, as I assumed this would prove necessary. It worked like a charm.



4 comments:

  1. Thank you for your post; we got past the error and was able to run the report because of it. Another issue arose though; we have several locations that have departments that roll-up into it. EG. Location A will have departments 1-3 and we wish to be able to report them as a consolidated result and individually if required. So our tree has Locations ?A-???-&&&&& with departments ?1-???-&&&&&, ?2-???-&&&&&, ?3-???-&&&&& as demoted units under it. The issue is that all of the demoted units reports include the other departments and does not separate them out at all. Have you encountered this and do you know how to fix it?

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  2. Gerri,

    Perhaps I am reading this wrong but it looks like your location code and departmental code occupy the same space in you chart. I would consider this unusual. Please let me know if this is indeed the case.

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  3. There are 5 segments being used so: ?-?-??-?-&&&&&. The first 2 as a combo indicated a location so 0-A meant Australia. The 3rd and 4th segments are being used for functions and the 5th is the account code.

    When they first started using FRX/GP they were hard-coding the ROW lines and so it didn't matter then. A couple of years ago they decided to do departments within a location and so they re-worked 0-A to be the company level (where all the balance sheet items sit) and then 0-1, 0-2 and 0-3 to be the departments. This created so many codes that hard-coding became difficult so we started writing FRX reports with ROW lines by ACCT CATEGORY or by natural account groups. This worked okay and even the trees worked because we designated the demoted units as ?-1-??-?-&&&&& etc all sitting under the parent unit. It is only since this change to viewpoint where we've noticed that the mask isn't working.

    Hope this clarifies?

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  4. I am not seeing this clearly, but I would try demoting the A segment to be in line with 1, 2 and 3, and see if you get duplication. If you do, then you'll need to figure out another way to roll up your locations.

    ReplyDelete