AP tables - Payments vs Checks

Question

Hi All,
We need to report transaction totals as per date range:
- Total No of Invoices Paid
- Total Amt Paid ($)
- Total No of Invoices processed
Had a basic question... which table to use.. AP_INVOICE_PAYMENTS_ALL or AP_CHECKS_ALL... because the total for same date ranges are diffrent, and not sure why.
Please let me know the relationship between the three tables and points to be taken care when creating the sum. If there are any existing queries, please share.
AP_INVOICES_ALL
AP_CHECKS_ALL
AP_INVOICE_PAYMENTS_ALL
Noticed, AP Checks do'nt have exchange rates. How to report multi currency trns?
Thanks in advance.
-Bhaskar

Answer 1

Bhaskar,
Well, I had to do this type of thing in Discoverer recently, or at least something similar (maybe not exactly the same).
You have to be careful, as I think you are seeing, with the accounting dates in AP_INVOICE_PAYMENTS_ALL. Say you wrote a check on 09/25/2009. On 11/15/2009, you voided the check. In AP_INVOICE_PAYMENTS_ALL, you get 1 set of entries dated 09/25/2009 and a reversing set dated 11/15/2009. So if you are data selecting 09/01/2009 to 09/30/2009, AP_CHECKS_ALL would say a check amount of 0, but AP_INVOICE_PAYMENTS_ALL would say a check amount (the original check amount).
So you have to think hard about what you want and test play with your data. For example, do you want to include voided checks in your counts, or not? They were checks that you did produce, after all. If count voids, do you count for the period when issued (check date) or the period when voided (accounting date - which might mean it gets counted twice)?
What I did was join AP_CHECKS_ALL to AP_INVOICE_PAYMENTS_ALL. I used check date (from the checks table) to select my check records. I had to do SUM(AMOUNT) from the invoice payments table. You have to do that because the amount from the checks table is in every joined row and gets added in extra times. Say you had a check that paid two invoices. Check for $100. Invoice 1 $60 and Invoice 2 $40. The join gives you Check A, 100, 60 for row 1 and Check A, 100, 40 for row 2. So if you sum amount from AP_CHECKS_ALL, you get $200, which is not right. Sum amount from invoice payments and you get $100, the right amount.
For invoice count, you probably will have to do a COUNT_DISTINCT on invoice id from the invoice payments table. This is because an invoice might be paid on more than one check. Say Invoice A had a part 1 for $20 and a part 2 for $10. Part 1 paid on check 1 and part 2 paid on check 2. Do you want to say the invoices paid count is 2, or 1. Some people might say 2, because I did have two different payments for that invoice. Others might say invoice count should be 1, because it was the same invoice, just on multiple checks. So you have to decide what you want to do. We went for the invoice paid count should be 1, which requires the Count_Distinct function.
Not sure what you mean by Total Invoices Processed. Maybe that is separate from payments? That you just want to know how many invoices were entered for a certain date range, regardless of payment status? We also wanted an invoice count, but not tied to payment status. So that is when you would start looking at the AP_INVOICES_ALL table.
In all cases, you have to study and determine what record statuses you want to include in your selection criteria. As maybe you can tell from the questions I was asking up above. What you want may be different from what we wanted. That is why I say you have to do testing with your real data to make sure you are meeting your specific requirements. This posting just helps to point you in the right direction. Hopefully you have Toad or SQL Plus as tools that you can use to do manual SQL statements against the tables. I used Toad to help me review our data here and figure out what I needed to do for selection criteria. Toad lets me see the joined results in detail so I can better understand what happens when I then GROUP the results (to summarize).
Hope this helps a bit. Good luck.
John Dickey