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System Administration |
  
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System Administration |
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In production systems like AdaptAccounts there are various administrative tasks that affect the overall system.
These System Administration functions include backups and archiving; system security and password control; setting up Users and their rights; setting up new Companies; setting the earliest and latest open transaction dates permitted for transactions affecting the General Ledger for each Company; specifying other control information for a Company; and compressing old transactions data.
In environments where there are various people accessing the system there should be one person responsible for System Administration. That person is usually called the System Administrator. If you're that person then this section is for you.
Demo company
The Demo Company is typically the initial Company database you create when AdaptAccounts is installed. The Demo Company contains sample data so you can practice working with AdaptAccounts before working with your own live data.
Do not use the Demo Company for real production work.
Once you’re ready to work with your own live data you create and activate a new Company database to be used for production.
AdaptAccounts provides powerful support for multiple Companies. Each Company has its own database but a common set of programs are shared by all Companies. This means, for example, that each Company could have different Fiscal Periods as well as its own Chart of Accounts and all other tables etc.
Use Login Company maintenance to activate a new Company.
Once you’ve set up your production Company or Companies and worked with them for a while you may have little interest in the original Demo Company. However, while its Active field is checked it will continue to be available for Company Login. To make the Demo Company unavailable for Company Login simply uncheck its Active field.
Open transaction dates
You can restrict the range of eligible transaction dates for Entry and Importing of transactions that affect the General Ledger. This includes General Ledger transactions (Journal Entries) themselves as well as Journal Entries that originate from Accounts Receivable and Accounts Payable or other applications.
The range of Open transaction dates affecting General Ledger is determined by the settings in the Date Control tabsheet of the Company maintenance task. If the transaction date for a transaction is not Open then that transaction will not be accepted.
Backup
There are three major points regarding Backups...
Do it
Do it right
Do it right daily
Nobody disagrees with the principle of doing regular backups. Yet when failures occur it can happen that there isn't a full current backup. Don't let that happen to you.
If you think that perhaps you're not always doing regular backups, as you know you should because of the time and inconvenience involved, consider improving your environment to make it easier. If your backups are large and you're backing up onto low capacity media then consider getting a drive that supports higher capacity media.
However you do your backups make sure you're doing them right. That is, don't wait until you really need to restore something that's really important to discover that your backup procedures didn't work the way you thought they did. Test the restore procedures to be sure that your backup procedures are correct and that you are familiar with how to restore.
You should backup the AdaptAccounts databases on a regular daily basis.
In addition to doing daily backups you should also consistently maintain a current backup copy off-site. This is to provide protection against some physical catastrophe such as a fire, flood or earthquake that affects your whole site rather than just a computer system failure. A good approach is to make two copies of the weekly backup and send or take one copy off-site. Otherwise if you don't want to make two full backup sets every week then send or take the full backup from the previous week off-site each week.
In addition to proper backup procedures, consider improving the reliability of your database Server with approaches such as RAID or disk-mirroring if you are not already doing so. If you don’t already have UPS protection on at least your database Server then consider providing it. Consider that the ideal backup is one you could use but never have to.
Compressing transaction tables
Compressing removes records from the regular AdaptAccounts transaction tables. You should always have a current backup before doing any compression. Applicable transaction maintenance tasks provide an Options | Compress... menu item and this is only enabled for the System Administrator.
Please note that compressing is not required by AdaptAccounts. You can keep your information on-line for as long as you want. The main reason for compressing old transaction data is that the benefits of having it on-line are less then the benefits in improved performance and disk space availability you'd get by compressing it. If you have old transactions on-line that you're no longer interested in then compress them.
You typically want to keep transaction details on-line until at least 15 or so periods have elapsed. In this way, all the supporting details of transactions for the prior fiscal year are available on-line for your auditor. In some situations, this means that certain audit tests could be performed more economically since your auditor could perform supplementary queries of the underlying database.
Transactions for each Application are compressed separately. For example, you may wish to keep Accounts Receivable transactions on-line longer than Inventory transactions. In the case of compressing Journal Entries, the system generates summary transactions to support comparatives.
Compressing prompts you to specify a cutoff. The type of cutoff varies by application. Specify a cutoff year for compressing Journal Entries or a cutoff date for compressing elsewhere. Note that regardless of the compress cutoff, it is only inactive transactions that are eligible for compressing. That is, active transactions such as outstanding invoices will not be compressed regardless of how old they are.