p_acq_10 changed the payment date of ALL Paid invoices

• Article Type: General
• Product: Aleph
• Product Version:  20, 21, 22, 23

Description:
We discovered that a run of p_acq_10 changed the payment date of all our invoices. It took hours to run, instead of just a few minutes, which seemed odd.

It was accidentally run with the "Retrieve by Payment Status" = "Paid", and the "Change Payment Status To" also "Paid". It found all our paid invoices from the past 10 years and set the payment date to Sept 13, 2006.

Our staff depend on this payment date when vendors call to dispute payment issues. At this point, there is no way to get back the original data from 6 weeks ago. (We're going to attempt to extract it from SAP, and import back to Aleph.)

Resolution:
In order to prevent this problem from occurring, we are suggesting (to Development) that one of three changes be made:

1) when the job is run with "Update Database" = Y, prevent p_acq_10 from retrieving ("Retrieve by Payment Status") invoices with a status that the user submitting the service is not allowed to change;

2) not permit "P" as a "Retrieve by Payment Status"; or

3) change the p-acq-10.xml F09 and F10 sections from "expand_drop_down" (using the ./xxx50/tab/tab48.eng invoice payment statuses) to regular drop_downs, with the values from ./usm50/tab/tab48.lng coded in to them.

Until such a change is made, you need to be very careful what values you specify for "Retrieve by Payment Status" and "Change Payment Status To" when submitting p_acq_10. You may also want to consider backing up the z77 prior to running the job.

This issue is still open and was escalated to Second line support for further analysis <2006-11-20 01:00:05>.
This issue is still open and was escalated to Second line support for further analysis <2007-01-14 01:00:08>.