Apply "Best Practices" to "List Codes"
Editor's note: This article continues a new series on the "best practices" FBS users have developed to improve effectiveness, efficiency, internal control and compliance from their information system.
Over that past six months we've been discussing "best practices" for FBS Ledger Accounts and Cost/Profit Centers. This month instead of concentrating on a specific category or module we'll share some across-the-board principles to help you get the maximum value out of FBS's coding and reporting logic.
Background
All FBS modules utilize specialized lists for accounting segments, inventories and sub-classifications. Most use up to six-characters with the exception of Projects and Groups which can include up to twelve characters. Although these codes are usually called "Numbers" (going back to the DOS days) they can include letters (upper and lower case) as well as numbers.
"Illegal" Characters vs. Report Filters
While nothing prevents you from using nearly any character on your keyboard in a list code, you should avoid these special characters used in FBS reports:
"-" is used to define a range of items (800-870)
"," is used to select multiple items that are not in a single range (B400, 9400, 69234)
"?" is used as a "wild card mask" to find all items that match a specific criteria (5?? will return all items that contain three characters and begin with "5").
Code Length
Don't make your codes any longer than absolutely necessary. Remember, you'll have to find and type these codes every day.
To facilitate the "wild card" reporting described above you'll want to use the same number of characters within a particular list. The exception is the Center list, which can be grouped by frequency of transactions (i.e. sales centers using short codes appearing at the top of the list and equipment using longer codes at the bottom of the list).
If you intend to use E.CLIPSE Management Accounting make sure your crop or livestock production centers don't exceed five characters so that WIP Centers can be automatically created.
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| Seed numbers provide a logical coding system. |
Coding System
Here you'll need to choose between the two schools of thought:
- The Numeric view believes that data entry is most efficient way totype using the numeric keypad.
- The Alpha camp is convinced that using meaningful alpha abbreviations is the most efficient way to locate something so you can type it.
Regardless of your preference here are some tips to improve your efficiency and reduce frustration:
- Develop a meaningful hierarchywith the "highest" level of identifiers on the left and the least critical on the right.
- Sort the Description column in the setup screen and items on many FBS lists will remain sorted alphabetically in the data entry mode.
- Use commonly-used codes if available (i.e. seed variety numbers, supplier SKU numbers).
- FBS will treat lower and upper case letters as separate codes (allowing 62 possibilities for each position (26 upper case, 26 lower case and 10 numbers); however, report searches are not case-sensitive.
Sort Logic
Before you begin using a list coding system it's helpful to understand how FBS (and software in general) sorts items, which always appear in this order:
- Shortest length of characters ("F" will appear before "10").
- Numbers before letters ("99" will appear before "B1").
- Upper case letters before lower case letters ("Z" comes before "a").
So with six potential characters the first possible item on a sorted list is "0" and the last is "zzzzzz". That's why many FBS reports will "default" to "0-zzzzzz" in their list selection fields.
We encourage you to fine-tune your own coding systems using these "best practice" guidelines. Remember you can re-label any list within FBS except Project and Groups without disturbing your data.
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