Increment Document Date at Set Time

Order processing documents, particularly on the Sales Order side, are usually processed at today’s date. In some organisations at a particular point in the day – often relating to delivery collections – documents will need to be processed with the next day’s date and the operator must remember to update this date and, if exit from the document process, remember to set again each time the document is opened. This new feature allows the setting of a system time at which to clock on to tomorrows date and also, optionally, skip weekends and bank holidays.

The configuration settings for the new ‘increment date’ option are included within the document design. To update select Installation from the main menu followed by, if Diamond or Premier, the option Application Manager and then Document Design Manager. Professional users should select Installation from the main menu and then Document Design Manager. Select Sales Order Documents or Purchase Order Processing as required and then select the document type before entering the number of the document you wish to update.

Once the document mask is displayed select the Parameters option at the top of the screen before selecting the ACTION button to move to screen 12 – Optional Features before clicking NEXT to move to screen 12a.

Use Today’s Date – the document date defaults to the system date which is usually today’s date but can be overridden by dates used in other options, setting this option forces the document to default to today’s date.

Clock on to next day at what time – enter the time in 24hr format at which to default the document to tomorrows date – i.e. 1545 / 1630 / etc.

When Clock On, Ignore Saturdays – if today’s date is a Saturday or Friday after the clock on time the system will, if set, ignore Saturdays and skip to the next day.

Ignore Bank Holidays – similar to above but will also skip Bank Holidays. Note however that the system uses the C29DATES.TXT file to determine which dates are bank holidays (this file is used with the special ‘!C29’ calculation option to determine the duration between two dates/times). When setting this option the system will warn if this file not found.

This file is a text file that can be maintained with any text editor (Notepad / WordPad etc.) which is created with a fixed layout in the DFCOMP location (usually \DFWIN\DATA). Its primary use is to calculate durations between start and end date/times but is now also used for this new feature to clock on the document date. The text file is formatted in a specific layout as below:

Line 1 – Flag if ignoring Saturdays in time calculations – Y or N

Line 2 – Flag if ignoring Sundays in time calculations – Y or N

Line 3 – Start of Working Day

Line 4 – End of Working Day

Lines 5-19 – records dates to be omitted from time calculations (bank holidays / firm closedowns etc.). The format is DD/MM/YY but all lines must be entered and if no date required set as XX/XX/XX.

An example layout would therefore be:

0900

1700

01/01/10

02/01/10

16/04/10

19/04/10

01/05/10

31/05/10

25/08/10

24/12/10

25/12/10

31/12/10

XX/XX/XX

Article ID: 44
Created On: Fri, Jun 8, 2012 at 1:43 PM
Last Updated On: Wed, Jun 14, 2023 at 5:01 PM

Online URL: https://kb.datafile.co.uk/article/increment-document-date-at-set-time-44.html