Posted on Tuesday 3 Jun 2014 by Carl

Faster run times.  Fewer clicks.  Fund multi-select.  These are the motivators behind our newest version of m-Fin OPERATING SUMMARY.

New way of filtering ORG | ORGNODE runs (faster run times)

For those of you that run by ORG | ORGNODE, notice that we’ve replaced the old activity prompts with two new prompts: PROJECT END DATE and WHEN NO DATA FOUND. Together, these two prompts should yield results similar to the old activity prompts but with an advantage in speed. We no longer have the overhead of pre-checking for FY activity. Doing away with this overhead benefits every kind of run – not just ORG | ORGNODE runs.

The SUPPRESS PAGE option is our new way of filtering FOPPS that have nothing booked.

Single speedtype mode (fewer clicks)

Long available in m-Fin TRIAL BALANCE SUMMARY, now m-Fin OPERATING SUMMARY gets the click-saving feature we call single speedtype mode. It’s meant for pulling up one speedtype at a time, on-screen.

Fund picklist (fund multi-select)

Need to run all 2x auxiliary funds? Just funds 30, 31, and 34? Now you can. The picklist of funds on the second page of prompting makes this possible, and it presents only the funds relevant to your choices from the first page.

Known issues

1. Drills. This version of the report occasionally has trouble with drills. The next version of the Cognos software fixes this issue. So we won’t take this version of the report to production until after we have the newer version of Cognos in place. If you are testing a drill and get QFS-ERR-0139 — The request has multiple errors, please re-run the report. We have found that this error happens only once per session. Drills start working after the error.  [02-Sep-2014 We are on the new version of Cognos and this is fixed now.]
2. Blank page. Using SUPPRESS PAGE occasionally results in a blank page at the end of HTML output. This happens when the final page of output turns out to be one that is to be suppressed. It’s harmless but does feel a bit mysterious when first encountered. We’ll be bringing this to the attention of IBM/Cognos to see if they might be able to improve this.

Testing, testing, 1,2,3

So while this version of the report will not go to production before August we are seeking feedback now to make sure we are on the right track with it. We know this is a busy time of year for you but if you can afford the time please give it a try in Cognos QA, and post a comment below with your feedback.  [Oct 2014 - This version of m-FIn OPERATING SUMMARY is in production now.]