We’ve been taking stock of the permissions that the ‘Finance’ group has in Quantum and are concerned about the implications that having ‘Inquire’ access to the ‘Accruals - Processing’ module has.
In order to carry out our daily reporting, this accrual screen is run as part of our scheduled end-of-day job (at around 21:00 each day). Running this process generates accruals for all bank accounts and deals and posts them to the general ledger. Once these accruals are posted, it is impossible to undo, on a system wide basis, without restoring the whole production environment to a previous backup (which has never been tried and tested in a production scenario).
What we are concerned about is that with this one ‘Inquire’ permission, we are able to run these accruals manually, at the push of the button, for any date. In one sense, this is an extremely valuable tool to us, as it means we can re-run historic accruals if changes are ever made to a deal, which is useful for reporting at month-ends and year ends. However, if a user were to accidentally key in a date in the future and click ‘Update’, this would calculate and post accruals, however far into the future, and have extremely serious consequences for daily, monthly and annual reporting (and require a production environment restore).
We therefore have two main qualms with how the system is currently functioning:
Being able to run accruals for any date, especially future dates, without any restriction is a significant risk; and
Only having a very basic module permission setup for this module (‘Inquire’ is the only permission available so it’s either all or nothing) doesn’t seem to be fitting for the implications that running Accruals can have. It would be much more useful to have separate ‘Inquire’, ‘Preview’ and ‘Update’ permissions for example, as this would allow us to view the module to see any error messages that were returned when running the scheduled job, and we could test run accruals without having the ability to actually update accruals. We believe this would not only be a huge benefit to ourselves, but to all clients using Quantum.
Many thanks Mark. I forwarded this onto the business team in question, and they think this fixes the issue. I think they were unaware of the Posting Type Report option which does what they want. Again - many thanks.
Hi there,
This functionality already exists.
There are currently two modes of Accruals: Reporting mode and Processing mode. The Processing mode, found under the Accounting Menu, is primarily used to post accruals via the Update option. Access to Accruals in Processing mode should be restricted to as few individuals as possible due to the reasons mentioned in the description of this idea.
The Reporting mode of Accruals, located under the Reporting menu, offers all the reporting capabilities of the Processing mode except for the ability to post accruals. The Update option is not available in Reporting mode. This Accruals page should be made accessible to individuals who need access to Accruals for reporting purposes. Please review this mode to meet your reporting needs.