If a distributor has had a customer for many years, the customer's highest balance may have been achieved so long ago that it's no longer meaningful. The new High Balance Months field would allow, for example, the distributor to indicate that they are interested in the customer's highest balance in the previous 36 months, giving perhaps a better perspective on their most recent activity.
To accomplish this, FACTS now maintains each balance change. When initially converting to FACTS 9.0 or later, FACTS will record 2 entries, one for the existing high balance as stored in the customer table, and one for the current balance at the time of the conversion. If you initially set the number of months to look at for the high balance such that the converted high balance date is excluded, initially the current balance would be the highest.
When converting to 9.0 or later, the default setting for high balance months is "All".
Note: The high balance and high balance date are updated as part of the pre-write IO procedure for ARCUST, just as the creation of the ARHIST records is done in a pre-write IO procedure for ARCUST. If ARCUST is not updated for a specific customer, the high balance and high balance dates are likewise not updated. This means that if a customer account becomes completely static, the high balance will not change. Loading the customer in customer F/M and saving the record will trigger the high balance to be recalculated, if the user wants to force the field to be changed.
A new field, High Balance Months in AR Static Control F/M, holds the number of months back to look to calculate the customer's highest balance and high balance date. If the field is left blank, all customer history is used.
Customer F/M has been changed such that you can no longer change the high balance or the high balance date. They are now display-only fields.
The Sales History tab of Customer F/M has been enhanced to include a new optional process to change past usage. This process will change the 'Update Usage' flags on all historic usage transactions (both sales orders and lost sales), for the specified customer, to the selected value. This process cannot be fully reversed. A new Change Past Usage button displays a pop up window to allow the user to move everything to 'Update Usage'=N or move everything to 'Update Usage'=Y. You cannot reset everything to its original value. This update is performed by a background process (i.e., you will not see the results immediately), then the actual usage values for the impacted items will be updated during the daily recalculation (usually overnight).
The reference number field was expanded from 15 to 30 on the invoice output and print. The reference number stays in the same place and all other fields on the output shift right.