5 Ways to Get a Life Doing Data Entry

Let’s face it, mass data entry, especially the same recurring entry month after month, is about as enthralling as those high school science films like “Your Friend Zinc Oxide”. Oh sure there are some people out there that can put on their headphones, get their Shaka-Kan tunes going, turn off their higher brain functions and get IN THE GROOVE! But I’m not one of them. I remember trading shifts over at the IRS from the Data Entry Department over to the Extraction Department for the exciting possibility of opening a letter bomb to put me out of my misery.  So when I start with a new accounting package one of the first things I want to learn is how to automate data entry.

100 Fund Accounting has several tools toward this end.

1. Play the Keys – There are two keys on the Keyboard to get your journey toward blissful entry going. The Function Key 5 (F5) and Function Key 6 (F6). F5 will copy the contents of the CELL directly above it. F6 will copy the ENTIRE LINE. That way you can change a few key codes and save enough strokes to change your golf score.

2. Let the computer remember- There is a function called the memorize document. This allows you to enter a document once and then save it for future use. After you have memorized a document, you can recall it in later data entry. There are even options to recall it with different dollar amounts and have it do the fancy math to figure out how much goes to each fund.

3. Total Recall – Memorize documents for power users. When you memorize a document you can tell the system, “This is so cool I want to automatically use it next month,” and it becomes part of your data entry social calendar. Every morning you log into the software you get a list transactions waiting for a hot date. 

4. Déjà vu – A good old standby is to simply copy documents or entire sessions. In most forms of data entry, there is a “copy posted document” button that lets you use a specific document over again more times than your three year old watches that Barney video.

You can also copy the ENTIRE SESSION, duplicating hundreds of documents at once without risking a chipped nail.
In both copy processes, you have the awesome ability to change the document and effective dates thus bringing your data more up to date than your smart phone.

But beware with the copy process as it duplicates the exact copy of the document numbers involved. If you’re doing this with AP or AR transactions, it can get you into more trouble than getting drunk at the company Holiday party and faxing an embarrassing photocopy to Chicago. Use the recurring entries instead.

5. Import Duties – Importing, the ultimate expression of data entry efficiency. If you can squeeze enough blood out of the budget rock to get a properly configured import file, then you can suck data in with such speed and efficiency it would bring tears to a Bavarian Engineers eyes.

The options are out there, so go forth and make your data entry life not suck.

Tom Tweedel

Sr. Customer Support Analyst

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Simple Steps To Keep Your Financial Data Trustworthy

One of the most valuable assets any organization has is its data.  Your data is the foundation for telling your organization’s story, setting strategy, making decisions, and providing proof of program success and financial solvency.  Yet many nonprofits simply don’t pay enough attention to their data until a problem is detected.

Data corruption or inconsistencies are a common risk with any database and there are a number of steps your organization can take to keep your data trustworthy.

My top tip for Sage 100 Fund Accounting users is to regularly run the data integrity check process.  What’s that?

Data integrity checks are not a complete catch all to detect any abnormalities in the database. But , when used properly they can alert users to the fact that data has gotten out of sync before too much time goes by. They can also serve to help diagnose and troubleshoot certain reporting problems that seemingly have no explanation.

Data Integrity Checks (DIC’s) are accessed by launching the Sage 100 Fund Accounting Administration module and going to Organization > Data Integrity Checks.  See the screen shot below.

One gotcha is that all users have to be logged out before the DIC’s can be run.

For the most part DIC’s check the integrity and relationship among tables and transactions in the database. When information is written to the database it is often spread among several tables. DIC’s make sure that the individual transactions contain all the info they need in all the tables and that it all sums up together. If a transaction didn’t properly write or your database has some corruption these checks will detect the inconsistency of the records and report on it.

DIC’s are broken into several groups and given numbers. When running DIC’s its best to run all of them at once. This can take anywhere from 30 seconds to 10’s of minutes on average. When done the DIC’s will display a report about what passed and what failed.

Failure of data integrity checks doesn’t automatically mean things are horribly wrong or you need to call the DBA. It depends on which ones have failed:

• Some DIC failures (AP17/AR26) are usually because the user has mis-posted a document in a closed year and is easily fixed through data entry.
• DIC failures 12/13 have to do with the use of Interfund Transfer GL codes and the way they close (or don’t) into fund balance and may not be a problem at all.
• Many of the other failures can be fixed with a simple script available on the knowledgebase that will re-index tables.
• In some cases failures will be beyond what the user can correct and you will have to contact support.

Data integrity checks should be run frequently to assure the health of your database. There is no set schedule but running them on a weekly basis is a good guideline. Doing so will help you catch a problem before it become too serious.

Thomas Tweedel
Sr. Customer Support Analyst, Customer Support
Sage Nonprofit

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