Merging Customer Account removes all OPENING AND CLOSING BALANCES!!

Submitted by Ben_Charlton on Fri, 28/03/2014 - 17:21

General User's Discussion

Small warning - merging 2 customers removes all opening and closing balances from the new account!!!

This resulted in a 200 page statement for one of our customers this month!

Re: Merging Customer Account removes all OPENING AND CLOSING ...

Submitted by tanderson on Fri, 28/03/2014 - 20:23.

I don't see that it can do anything else.

When merging two customers 'From' and 'To', the business rules used are:

1. remove all Opening and Closing balances belonging to 'From'

It doesn't make sense to move these to 'To', as they represent totals that won't be valid in the merged customer.

2. remove any Opening and Closing balances belonging to 'To' that are dated on or after the first transaction date of From

This is required as the Opening and Closing balances now need to incorporate the 'From' customer's transactions

3. move all the 'From' customer's transactions to 'To'

If one customer's transactions are before the other's, you can select the customer with the oldest history to merge to; that will minimise the number of Opening and Closing balances removed.

-Tim

Re: Merging Customer Account removes all OPENING AND CLOSING ...

Submitted by tgething (not verified) on Sat, 29/03/2014 - 03:28.

What would happen if having done the merge, you re-ran the last Reporting|Debtors|End Period. I think (having just done it on my test system) that this will have no effect on all the other customers, but will generate an open/close pair for the merged account for the statement date.

Note that when this discussion concludes I will add stuff to the merge button discussion on the CSH page http://www.openvpms.org/documentation/csh/1.7/customer/information - something along the lines of:

"Note also that as part of the merge, Opening and Closing Balance transactions will be removed from the merged account. Because of this, it is best if you merge TO the customer with the oldest transaction history. Secondly, because statements generated by Reporting|Debtors show transactions back to the Opening Balance prior to the Statement Date, you should probably re-rerun the End Period processing for the previous accounting period so as to fill in the Opening Balance for the merged customer account. Otherwise the next statement generated for the merged account will list all transactions back to the date of the last Opening Balance transaction prior to the earliest of the merged FROM customer's account."

If the above para needs to be re-worded please yell.

Regards, Tim G