Three things called a knock-off, and which number each one moves — transcript

Play this as a presentation — one slide per step, with the same narration. Every word of every step is on this page.

This presentation is for whoever at GadgetSphere is asked, by a branch or by a customer, why an invoice still shows as owing after the money was received and applied. In about eleven minutes you will learn to read the three figures every customer and supplier document carries, which of them a settlement moves and which it never will, why the general ledger is untouched by a knock-off, and how the word knock-off covers three different mechanisms that fail in three different ways.

Step 1 — Read the three columns before you read anything else

After this step you will stop watching a number that was never going to move. Open the Outstanding Document Report in the Debtor Report applet and read one row across. Three figures sit side by side. ARAP Doc Open is what the document opened with, on its own. ARAP Contra is the total of everything applied against it since. ARAP Balance is the two added together, and it is what the customer still owes. A knock-off moves Contra, and therefore Balance. It never moves Doc Open, and most afternoons lost to this question were spent watching Doc Open. Do the arithmetic once: Doc Open plus Contra equals Balance, always, because the two figures that move are written together. So the arithmetic is not the test. The test is whether Contra moved, and if it did not, whether the document’s Contra tab has any rows at all.

Reference: I knocked it off and the outstanding balance hasn’t changed — The 30-second check

Step 2 — Know that Doc Open is set by the document, and only by the document

After this step you will know what Doc Open is. When a document is created, BigLedger sorts its lines into two kinds: the lines that charge, which are the goods, the services and the tax, and the lines that collect on the spot, which are the settlement methods taken at the counter as part of the same document. Doc Open is those two added together. A cash bill at GS-KV-03 that charged two thousand four hundred ringgit for a laptop and took two thousand four hundred by card opens at zero and is finished the moment it is raised. An invoice on thirty-day terms opens at two thousand four hundred. It is recomputed only when the document itself is saved; the settlement machinery never writes to it. That is the first of the three knock-offs: money taken on the document, which shows in Doc Open, and it is a different mechanism from the second.

Reference: I knocked it off and the outstanding balance hasn’t changed — Doc Open is the document’s own face, and it is set once

Step 3 — Know that a contra is a mirrored pair that is re-summed, never nudged

After this step you will read a Contra tab correctly. The second knock-off is a contra: money applied afterwards, between two existing documents, a receipt against an invoice. It is stored as two rows sharing one group, one filed on each document with the amount negated on the second, so each document sees the movement from its own side, and that is why you find the same settlement listed on both Contra tabs. The document’s Contra figure is then re-summed from all its rows, from scratch, every time a settlement is created or removed, and again on any save the document still accepts. It is not nudged up and down. This is why a single missed refresh does not compound: the next settlement against the same document recomputes the whole figure and puts it right. Who writes the pair, and at what moment, is the next presentation, and it is not who you think.

Reference: I knocked it off and the outstanding balance hasn’t changed — Contra is a mirrored pair, not an entry

Step 4 — Know that the ledger does not move when a contra is applied

After this step you will stop looking for the knock-off in the journals. When the receipt voucher was finalised, its own journal debited the bank’s cash book account and credited the customer’s receivable account, whether or not a contra ever followed. The invoice’s journal had already debited that receivable account when the invoice was finalised. So the ledger is already right before any contra. The contra writes no journal at all. It moves the invoice’s balance, the customer’s ageing and the statement, and nothing on the trial balance. The one exception is a cross-currency pair, which posts an exchange-difference journal for the gain or loss. That is also why the debtor report and the Balance Sheet’s trade-debtor line can disagree without either being wrong: one is built from documents and their contras, the other from journals, and a manual journal straight at the control account appears in only one of them.

Reference: Recording a Customer Payment — Step 7: Finalise

Step 5 — Know the third knock-off, which is a quantity and has its own job

After this step you will not send a quantity question down the money path. The third thing the business calls a knock-off has nothing to do with money: the quantity an invoice takes off a sales order, read by the KO For tab and by available stock. It is a stored row per order line per downstream document type, written by a background job after the order reaches FINAL, rewritten the moment a link is saved, and deleted outright when it reaches zero. It needs an enabled Knock Off Configuration pair for that document-type pair, or no row is ever created and the invoice simply cannot find the order. It fails differently from a contra: a balance that never came down is refusing stock that is on the shelf, and the watchdog written to re-post it is not registered and has never run. Its page is the order page, and nothing on the money pages moves it.

Reference: The order still shows a quantity outstanding after I invoiced it all — How the number is kept, and why that matters

Step 6 — Run the check that separates the four shapes

After this step you will answer the question in thirty seconds. Open the row on the Outstanding Document Report and read the three columns. If Contra has moved and the balance you were watching was Doc Open, nothing is wrong; you were reading the document’s face. If Contra is still zero, open the document’s Contra tab: no rows means the settlement never reached this document, and the commonest reason is a second request that never got through, which the next presentation explains. If there are rows on the tab, add them up. If they match the Contra column, the settlement worked and you are reading the wrong report. If the tab adds up to more than the column, that is the rare one: the rows were written and the figure was not refreshed, and the last presentation says what to send to support. Four shapes, two tabs, and no arithmetic on the three columns.

Reference: I knocked it off and the outstanding balance hasn’t changed — The 30-second check

How the steps fit together

    flowchart TD
  s1["Step 1 — Read the three columns before you read anything else"]
  s2["Step 2 — Know that Doc Open is set by the document, and only by the document"]
  s3["Step 3 — Know that a contra is a mirrored pair that is re-summed, never nudged"]
  s4["Step 4 — Know that the ledger does not move when a contra is applied"]
  s5["Step 5 — Know the third knock-off, which is a quantity and has its own job"]
  s6["Step 6 — Run the check that separates the four shapes"]
  s1 --> s2
  s2 --> s3
  s3 --> s4
  s4 --> s5
  s5 --> s6
  

Check yourself

Three to five questions on what you just heard. Every correct answer links to the page that makes it correct, so you can check the source, not just the mark.

Next: Who writes the contra, and when the balance moves · Back to the series · Play this as a presentation