Setting up the Background Posting Scheduler

In some circumstances, cash entries, sales invoices and credit notes, payable invoices and credit notes, and certain journal types are batched up for posting by a scheduled job. When you post these documents they are given a "Ready to Post" status and temporary worker item records are created.

See About the Background Posting Scheduler for more details.

To set up the scheduled job that is required to post "Ready to Post" documents, log in as a System Administrator user and then:

  1. Click the Background Posting Scheduler tab.
  2. Choose the frequency with which you want the scheduler to run. The options are:

    Hourly: Specify the interval at which you want the job to be repeated, for example every two hours. The Preferred Start Offset is the number of minutes after the hour when you would like the scheduler to run. So, for example, if you set the repeat interval to one hour and the preferred start offset to 15 min, and the time when you click Schedule Job is 09:10, the scheduler will first run at 09:15.

    Daily: Enter the Preferred Start Time for the scheduler to run each day.

    Weekly: Enter the day of the week and the Preferred Start Time for the scheduler to run on that day.

    Monthly: Specify the day of the month, either by entering a number such as Day 17 of every month, or by specifying a pattern such as the third Tuesday of every month. Then set the Preferred Start Time.

    Tip:

    If you have a lot of documents to post, we recommend that you run smaller batches more frequently. Do this by selecting "Hourly", rather than "Daily" or "Weekly" for example.

  3. Click Schedule Job. A message is displayed showing when the scheduler will next run.

Clicking Run Now causes background posting to run immediately, in addition to running at the scheduled time.

Note:

You can view the scheduled job by going to Monitoring | Scheduled Jobs but do not edit the scheduled job from this page because the editor does not support all the functionality available on the Background Posting Scheduler tab.

Giving Other Users Permission to Start the Background Posting Scheduler

You can allow other users to start the Background Posting Scheduler by assigning the following permission sets to them:

  • Accounting and Billing - Background Posting - Run Now
    This permission set allows users to view the Background Posting Scheduler tab and click Run Now to run the scheduler for all "Ready to Post" documents in the organization.
  • Accounting and Billing - Background Posting - Listview
    This permission set allows users to click Background Post on the sales invoice, sales credit note, payable invoice, payable credit note, and journal list views. When a user clicks Background Post on the sales invoice list view (for example), only sales invoices with the status "Ready to Post" in companies that the user is logged into will be posted in the background. If a user with administrator privileges clicks the Background Post button, then sales invoices with the status "Ready to Post" in all companies will be posted in the background. The Background Post button on the other document type list views processes those documents in the same way.

Email Notifications and Error Handling

When you post documents that are batched up for posting by a scheduled job, you receive email notification once the process has completed. The notification contains a link to the worker log group where all the results are listed. You must review the worker log group and fix any errors before trying again.

By default the background posting process makes three attempts to post a document that has its tax calculated by Avalara, and three attempts to post other documents. These defaults are controlled by custom settings for the Background Posting Scheduler. Once a document has failed to post for the number of attempts specified, its status is set back to "In Progress" so that you can fix the error before submitting it for posting again. If the worker log group notifies you of the same errors multiple times it may be because the number of attempts specified for these custom settings have been increased; you can delete the worker log group to avoid being notified of the same errors repeatedly, or set these custom settings back to their default values.

Note: When viewing the error logs, even when a batch contains multiple errors only one error is shown.

See Background Posting Scheduler Settings for information about custom settings relating to the Background Posting Scheduler.

Documents left in "Ready to Post" Status

If a document fails to post and is left in the "Ready to Post" status instead of being set back to "In Progress", you can manually edit the document's status and change it to "In Progress" provided that no worker items remain for the document.

To edit the document's status:

  1. Open the document and click Edit.
  2. Change the Status from "Ready to Post" to "In Progress".
  3. Save the document.

You must correct the reason the document failed to post before attempting to post again. Common reasons for a document failing to post can be that the period is closed, the account trading currency is not set up on the account, and custom validations.

Note:

If an error is displayed when you try to change the document's status, it might be because a worker item exists for the document. If you have access to the Worker Item tab, filter the records by the Work Reference Description field to see if any correspond with your document number. If a worker item does exist for the document, contact Certinia Support for assistance.