Venture

There are currently 2 reports for A/P that can be generated, the Expense Journal and the Check Register report. You can run these reports by selecting Reports->On-Demand Reports->A/P from the main menu in the Accounting module.

Here is the page you will be presented:

This is the Expense Journal report form, and you can click on the “Check Register” tab to run the Check Register report. The Check Register form looks like this:

On the Check Register report form,  start and end cash accounts are branch - account #, the company is assumed to be the current working company.

Reports are saved in tab-delimited format in your user reports which are shown in the bottom window of the page. You can click the “Download” button to download them to your computer, and open them in OpenOffice, Excel or any other spreadsheet for viewing and printing.

Note that reports you generate and get saved on the server only stay there for 6 months before the system deletes them. If you want to keep reports around longer you’ll need to download them to your local computer.

Reports you no longer need can be deleted by clicking “Delete”, and note they are deleted permanently and cannot be recovered.

When payment batches are committed, besides payment being applied to the invoice, entries are created in the payment register.

You can open the payment register by opening the A/P batch selector by selecting A/P -> A/P Batch from the main menu in the accounting module.

Click the “Open Payment Register” button to open the payment register. When opening the payment register you will by default be shown all the payments that haven’t been marked as paid. Here is an example:

Here a payment has been selected, and in the window on the top right, you can see what invoices were paid, and the amount. Clicking on one of those invoices will fill in the invoice detail below the window.  This way you can see easily what payments paid how much on what invoices.

You can narrow down the payments seen by filling in values in the search filter, and clicking “Filter Results”.

You can set a payment as reconciled by right clicking on the payment, and then selecting “Reconcile Payment”. This will set the payment reconciled, and also set its status to paid. In the future when Venture writes checks, the payment for check type payments won’t get set to paid until the check is printed. At the moment, the “Print Checks” button is just a placeholder. If you make an error and set a payment to reconciled that shouldn’t have been, you can “unreconcile” the payment.

The second step in the Venture A/P work flow after creating invoices, creating payables. Payables are created in a batch just like creating invoice batches. In order to create a new payables batch select A/P -> A/P Batch from the main menu in the Accounting module and click the button “Create New Payment Batch”.

You will be prompted for 3 pieces of information, a unique batch ID, an account that the payment will be made from which is a menu of accounts that have been entered into Venture and a branch for that cash account. Once you enter these pieces of information and click “OK” or press “Enter” on your keyboard, you will be taken to a new payables batch.

Like the invoice batch you can press “N” on your keyboard or right click the window to add a new payable. You will be presented with the following dialog:

The vendor code “WOOD” has been entered, and tabbed off of populating the invoices window. Notice the last invoice is the one entered in the previous section, and has been selected. In the bottom window you can see the G/L disbursement entered along with the invoice.

To create a payable, select an invoice in the middle window, and press the “Enter” key on your keyboard. Pay Towards Invoice and Discount Amount will now be active:

Here is where you tell the system how much you want to pay towards the invoice and how much of a discount you are taking. Note that the Pay Towards Invoice is the gross amount, the Discount Amount will be subtracted from it to arrive at a net amount for the check.

Clicking on the “Add Transaction” button will add the payable to the batch, and will fill in the G/L entries for the payable in the top window, which in our case looks like this:

At this point you can add/edit/delete entries in the payable G/L distribution, and those changes will be saved if you close the transaction dialog, or if you select another invoice in the middle window and press “Return” to begin the process of adding another payable.

Note that each invoice you pay will create a new entry in the payables batch, but when entries are created in the check register, payables will be aggregated by vendor so there will just be one check created per vendor.

There is a second way to create entries in a payables batch, and that’s through clicking the “Open Payables Due” button on the top. This will open a dialog to find invoices you want to pay:

Here you can select what expected pay type, days until invoice is due, start & end vendor, and whether you want to see credits and invoices that have a pending due of 0.00.

In the above example we’re looking for all invoices that are less than 30-days out, are going to be paid from the 5-Points account and are between WOD and WOOD in the vendor code. One invoice was found. If more than one is found you can multi-select the invoices you wish to pay, and then click “Create Batch Entries” to create the entries in your payables batch. Note that if the invoices were entered with a discount amount, and the discount date less than or equal to the current date, the discount will be taken. You can see in the list of invoices what the discount amount is, and whether the system will take the discount if converted to the batch.

If we select the invoice and click “Create Batch Entries” the batch now looks like this including the previous entry:

Note that like the invoice batch, as you create entries in the batch, they are stored to the server. So you can leave a batch at any time and all the lines you have saved to the batch will be there when you return. You can continue to edit a batch until you commit it.

Once you’re happy with the batch, you can commit it from the batch selector reached by clicking A/P -> A/P Batch from the main menu. When you select a payment batch from the batch selector and click “Commit Payment Batch” you will be shown an Anticipated Cash Disbursement Journal, which looks like this:

You have the option of printing the journal by clicking “Print”, and if you’re happy, click “OK” or press “Return” on your keyboard to commit the batch. If you need to make changes, click “Cancel” or press “ESC” on your keyboard to abort the commit.

When you commit the payment batch, payment will be applied to the invoice, and entries will be created in the check register, which is outlined in the next section.

The latest release of Venture 3.6.9 has accounts payable functionality, including G/L reporting, but not G/L proper. This document intends to be a short introduction to A/P in Venture.

A/P: Gimme Three Steps

The logical workflow for A/P goes thusly:

1) Enter payable invoices in “Invoice” batches. When an invoice batch is committed, the invoice is created in Venture, and a payable can be applied to that invoice. Reconciling invoices against material receipt happens at this stage for regular invoices — prepaid invoices are reconciled after-the-fact from A/P invoice lookup.

2) Enter paybles in “Payment” batches. This is where you select invoices for payment, can pay invoices through a “Payables Due” lookup, and when the batch is committed, records are created in the “Payment Register”. It’s called a “Payment Register” and not a “Check Register” because all payments, even those not paid by check reside there. When you go to commit a payment batch, you will be presented with an Anticipated Cash Disbursement Journal report that you can elect to accept or dimiss, depending on if you’re happy with the batch.

3) Reconcile payments in the “Payment Register”. At time of writing, Venture doesn’t write checks, but fakes check #’s for check-type payments. Payments can be reconciled, but checks can’t be printed at the moment. In the future, this is where checks will be selected for batch printing.

All of the above are accessed from the main menu in the accounting module through the A/P -> A/P Batch menu as seen below:

Invoice batches

When starting a new batch, you will be asked for a “Batch ID” and a default branch # which is the branch that the A/P G/L entries will be created. The batch ID must be unique, and not used before.

Once entering shown a screen that shows all the transactions in the batch. Here is the screen, and note that the batch ID and default branch are shown:

To enter a new invoice, you can press the “N” key, or right click to start. If pressing “N” doesn’t work, click on the area where the transactions are shown and then press the key. That area must have focus to recognize the key press. Entering a new invoice will present you with this dialog:

The “Expected Pay Type” is how you expect to pay the invoice, and will determine which cash account the invoice is paid from. Please note that when creating payment batches, you can pay invoices who’s expected pay type differs from the batch — Venture will prompt you for confirmation that you really want to do that. The expected pay type on the invoice won’t change, it’s left alone for historical purposes.

Here’s the same dialog with a bit of information filled out, and ready to reconcile:

Notice there is only the first 2 digits of the P/=O # entered, you don’t have to enter the full PO #, you will be presented with all the material receipts that match what you enter for vendor code and PO #, and once you select a receipt to be reconciled, the choices will be limited to just that vendor/PO for reconciling the receipt so users don’t accidentally reconcile across multiple PO #’s.

Here is what you are presented with when entering material receipt reconciliation:

You are shown all the material receipts that match the vendor code/PO, and the next step is to select a receipt for reconciliation. Notice that that there are totals at the bottom, which are:

• A/P Freight Total: The freight-in for the invoice, as entered on this screen. (It’s zero right now, we’ll correct in a moment)
• A/P Reconciled Total: The total amount of freight + material reconciled in this dialog.
• Invoice Amount: The gross invoice amount entered in the previous screen.
• Discrepancy Amount: The difference between the gross invoice amount entered on the previous screen and the total amount reconciled on this dialog including freight-in.

Selecting the second line in the list of material receipts will present you with this screen:

You can now see all the lines that were received on the PO, the quantity already reconciled (Qty Recon), the expected cost, the invoice cost which is the corrected cost, and the same as the expected cost when the material receipt is created. Below you have a few choices:

• Accept Receipt: Accept full material receipt shown as-is with no changes.
• Accept Selection: Clicking the “Accept Selection” button will accept all the lines selected in the material receipt as-is. You can select a subset of the material receipt by just selecting the lines to reconcile. To select a range of lines click a line and then hold down the “Shift” key and select the end of the range to select. To select one-at-a-time, hold down the “Ctrl” key as you click lines to add to the selection.
• Select All: Select all lines of the material receipt.
• Clear Selection: Clear selection.

You also have the option to add lines to the invoice reconciliation, adjusting cost/quantity. Select all the lines you want to edit, then press the “Return” key on your keyboard. You will open a dialog that shows you the lines you selected one-by-one and you can correct the information in the material receipt, and as you “Tab” off the last input field, the next line in your selection will be shown for editing until there are no more lines to adjust.

Let’s assume the material receipt matches the invoice, and we just clicked “Accept Receipt”. You’re brought back to the first tab and it looks like this:

The lower window shows you all the lines you have reconciled, and 5.00 was entered in freight-in to show that you can enter it anytime during process before you click “Accept Reconciliation”.

If you make a mistake, you can select lines in the lower window, and then right-click and select the menu option to remove them from the reconciliation. You can then go through the process of selecting the material receipt, selecting the lines, and adding them again.

Once you are happy with the reconciliation, you can click “Accept Reconciliation” and you will be returned to invoice entry. If you want to cancel the reconcilation you can click the “Cancel” button, or press the “ESC” key on your keyboard.

Now let’s look at invoice entry post-reconcilation:

The gross, net an freight amounts of the reconciliation now show up, the PO # has been filled out, the “Effect Cost” checkbox is checked since it was checked on the reconcilation dialog, and the branch # has been set to 16 since the reconciled receipt was received to warehouse 16.

The remaining fields to be entered should be somewhat self-explanatory, and note that the discount date and due date will automatically prefill if “Discount Days” and “Due Days” are set on the vendor master, otherwise they just default to the same as the invoice date and can be modified by the user.

When you tab down the form, once focus lands on the bottom G/L window, the system creates default entries:

You can add new G/L entries, and with the exception of the accounts payable entry, the other entries can be deleted or edited. Right click on an entry to get a menu option to delete it, or double click on it to edit it, and click the “Add G/L Entry” button to update the entry. Be aware that when you double click the G/L entry to edit it, you won’t be able to add a new entry until you clicked the “Add G/L Entry” button to confirm your change.

Once you’re happy with everything, click the big “Add A/P Invoice Transaction” button on the bottom of the dialog, and the entry will be created in the batch, the form will be reset, and focus will return to the “Vendor Code” textbox so you can continue entering more invoices, or you can click “Done” or hit the “ESC” key on your keyboard when your’re done.

Here’s what the batch looks like after entering our invoice:

If you need to make changes to an entry, you can press “Enter” while it’s highlighted, or right click and select “Edit Transaction”. You can also delete lines from the invoice batch by right clicking on them and selecting “Delete Transaction”.

When a entry is added to the batch, it’s also saved on the server, so you can leave the batch and return to it without losing your work.

Next in the work flow is “Payment” batches, which is covered in the next section.

A new Venture based project, Pop Art Machine, is available to the public in a beta version release.

Pop Art Machine’s database features over 1,000,000 unique item records (art & photography).

The public is invited to explore the pop art exhibit catalog. 

Open source ERP software enthusiasts take note — the entire site is driven with a realtime link to a Venture 3.6.5 installation. 

Venture 3.6.5 is now available!  A formal release statement including features is pending.

The problem is that PayPal doesn’t send an eBay transaction ID along with BIN auctions.  When the ebay_auction_winners table is updated by the paypal_collector.php script, one tuple of the key is missing in order to only update one record with the IPN.

To get an auction to go through, login to PayPal and search in History for the IPN that isn’t getting converted to an order.  Click on the auction to open a window into eBay and click the transaction history link and login to eBay.

Look for the username in the PayPal window and find the matching transaction in the eBay window.  Look at the options on the right in a menulist, and mouse over them until you see one that has the transaction ID.  I usually copy the URL into an editor so I can cut-n-paste the transaction ID out of it.

Now get into the Venture database and issue the following SQL:

select * from ebay_auction_winners where ebay_transaction_id = ‘<ebay txn id>’;

There’s a few scenarios of what can be wrong:

A) The winner record has the wrong IPN # associated with the ebay_transaction_id.

FIX:  Update the winner record with the correct IPN #.

B) There are multiple records that match the IPN #.

FIX: Delete all winners records that have the same IPN # as the one you’re trying to fix, but don’t have the correct ebay_transaction_id

C) The payment_method_code in the winner record is wrong.  It should be ‘PayPal’.

FIX: Update the winner record’s payment_method_code setting it to ‘PayPal’.

NOTE: The tuple that uniquely identifies a record in the ebay_auction_winners table is: (ebay_auction_id, ebay_transaction_id)   If you want to only update/delete one record in that table, those two fields must be present in the WHERE clause of your SQL.

There is a script that will dump 5 tab-delimited files for item and category data. The script lives on the Venture machine under the scripts directory in this subdirectory:

venture-scripts/data_import/OSCommerce/venture_osc_dump.php

It will dump the files into whatever your current working directory is. It’s probably best to ‘cd’ to the directory where the script is and run it from there.

The 5 .txt data files need to copied up to the OSCommerce machine to this directory:

/var/www/htdocs/popartmachine.com/scripts

On the devel2 machine, ‘cd’ to /var/www/htdocs/popartmachine.com/scripts and run the script osc_import_venture_data.php.

The import script also looks for the .txt files in the current working directory.

Example SQL: report LTL shipments with shipment destnation, weight and outbound freight collection amounts.

select
freight_carrier,
upper(shipping_city),
upper(shipping_locality),
(select upper(city)
from warehouse_master
where company_id = a.company_id
and warehouse_code = a.warehouse_code)
as ship_from_city,
to_char(date_confirmed, ‘DD/MM/YYY’) as date_confirmed,
(select sum(quantity_shipped * coalesce(unit_weight, 0))
from sales_order_line_items
where sales_order_header_id = a.sales_order_header_id)
as total_weight,
shipping_mailing_code,
freight_out
from sales_order_header as a
where date_confirmed > ‘2007-01-01′
and freight_carrier != ‘Fedex’
and freight_carrier != ‘UPS’
and freight_carrier != ‘USPS’
and freight_carrier != ‘N/A’
and freight_carrier != ‘Local Pickup’;

1) If you haven’t setup a user w/ eBay this needs to be done first.

2) Setup Venture configs under the eBay section.  You can copy all the data from a company that is already configured to work with eBay, the only difference will be eBay user which is the config ‘ebay_request_user’.  You will also want to set the config ‘ebay_template_pay_info’ with default payment instructions.

3) You will need to setup a PayPal account if one hasn’t been created already.

4) PayPal processing documentation pending.

In the scripts/digital_asset_manager directory, there is a script called “garbage_collection.php” that cleans up database records and files in the Venture file manager.

It removes files and database records that meet any of the following criteria:

• A file in the vDAM repository has no vdam_master reference to it - file will be removed
• A record in the vdam_master references a non-existent file in the vDAM repository - vdam_master and related vdam_meta records if present will be removed

• A record in the vdam_master has no related records in vdam_meta, orphaning the file - vdam_master and repository file will be removed.

Note that no inputs are supplied to this script, and it will remove files/database records without any prompting of confirmation from the user.

Venture can update item pricing from files uploaded by users. These are FTP’d to the Venture server and since every Venture installation is different, you’ll need to contact your system administrator to get FTP login information.

When you FTP up your file, there will be a main directory that Venture will look for pricing files, and your system administrator can setup subdirectories off this directory that are named the same as the Venture login of the users using the pricing service. Venture will also look for price update files in these subdirectories, and if it finds pricing files in the subdirectories, it will report in employee reports so the user can follow what is going on with her price updates and fix problems Venture reports. Updates dropped in the main directory won’t generate reports.

Venture expects tab-delimited data for price updates, and here is the layout the file must follow prefaced with the letter column they would appear in a spreadsheet program:

A: Vendor code
B: Manufacturer part #
C: UPC
D: UOM
E: Description
F: Purchase multiplier group
G: MFG List Price
H: MFG Net Price
I: Standard pack
J: Unit Weight
K: Package length
L: Package width
M: Package height

Note about MFG List Price v.s. MFG Net Price

If there is a MFG net price in your data file, this price will take precedence, even if a list price is supplied. By supplying a net price you are telling Venture that it should ignore any discount mulipliers (more about this below). If you supply a list price, Venture will multiply the price supplied by the discount multiplier in order to arrive at an item cost. Supplying a list price and setting a discount multiplier of 1 for items is functionally equivalent to using the net price field.

Note about price updates and special characters

Data is stored in Venture in the UTF-8 character set, also commonly known as UNICODE. Price updates from vendors are often in the Windows character set which is often incompatible with Venture when special characters are present. The easiest way around this is to open the price updates in a spreadsheet program that allows you to set the character encoding when you save the file. Free examples of programs that can do this are “Open Office” for Windows and Linux and “NeoOffice” for Macintosh.

Required Venture Records

There are records that must be setup in Venture before a price update can successfully load. You must have created the vendor master (Vendor->Add/Edit Vendor Record in the client), and the vendor code will need to appear in field “A” of your price update file. In the vendor master there is field called “Freight Factor”, and this is used to calculate standard cost from price update files. The price from the vendor is multiplied by the freight factor in order to determine item standard cost.

You must also create at least one “item multiplier” record (Administration->Vendors->Item Multipliers in the client) for the vendor you wish to use the price update service for. The item multiplier record contains a discount multiplier, which is used when you have vendor list price (”G”) instead of vendor net price (”H”). For instance, if your pricing file contains list pricing, and you receive a 30% discount from the vendor, your discount multiplier will be 0.7. The other field is the cost-to-list multiplier which is used for setting the base customer price on the item. If you want to set a 30% markup you would set this field to 1.3. You can have several item multiplier records for each vendor if needed, and the key for each of these is the “purchase multiplier group”, which is field “F” in your data file. Every record in the data file needs to point to a valid purchase multiplier group.

Pricing Service Internals

When you upload a price update file, Venture scans the upload directory and its subdirectories periodically, and when it finds files it attempts to load them into its database to a table named “pending_price_updates”. If a file is successfully loaded into this table, and you uploaded the file into your own subdirectory, Venture will create a report with an example 5 records so you can see if the data looks correct in the pending data. If there are problems, the report will contain an error report.

Once the file is successfully loaded into the pending_price_updates table, the user must initiate running the price update from the client. () Price update jobs are queued and run one at a time to prevent excessive load on the database from running several large price updates at once. An update can either be committed, or you can do a trial run first, look at the report from the trial run, then if you’re happy, commit the price update.  Reports from the price update service show up in employee reports (Reports->My Reports in the client), and since they are queued, you will have to check your reports periodically to see the results of the run.

When a price update is successfully committed, the data is removed from pending_price_updates, and the job is removed from the queue.

Client Options

When doing a trial run, or committing a price update, the user is presented with several options on how the price update should proceed. Here are the options and a description of their purpose:

Prepend Vendor Code: If selected, when creating new item records, the item code will consist of the first three characters of the vendor code, a space, and the MFG part #, or UPC code depending on which is supplied.

Add Item Codes: If selected, records in the price update that don’t match an item in Venture will be added. Matching can either be by MFG part #, UPC code, or item code, Venture will try all three.

Options for adding items:

Accept Zero Price: Add item codes that have a zero price from the vendor.

Item Type: Set to the item type new items should be set to. Either a regular item, or a direct-ship type item.

Default Warehouse Code: Default stocking location for items in price update. Used for Ecomm to source stock, and can be changed in the client after the update.

Item Matrix: Item matrix for items in update. Used for matrix pricing, and if not supplied defaults to zero.

Items that are in Venture, but not in price update file:

Inactivate Items: If an item is in Venture, but doesn’t match any records in the price update, inactivate the item in Venture.

Reporting:

Delta Percent: Report any items whose price has changed by more than the percent supplied.

Venture 3.6.5 Release Candidate #1 enhancements:

JS XPCOM global cache
Global caching allows all Venture client windows to use a single point of cache, offering better inter-window communication potential and robust data structure storage. This is mainly a clean-up effort in 3.6.5. A proof of concept function is included, however. If you change working company or log in as new user the results will span all open Venture windows.

Vdam, Venture digital assets manager
Venture’s digital asset manager relocates to an independent database and communicates with Venture or third party applications over HTTP. The primary advantage is greater scalability. We’ve removed table level data definitions and moved to an open attribute assignment system.

Product Categories
The category table(s) schema has been rebuilt for clarification. Over the years we inadvertantly merged table data related to categories for printing and for ecommerce. That is to say, the tables started as separate entities but slowly began merging in function. We rebuilt the category tables to reflect a unified source of information for both print and ecommerce applications.

Venture’s invoice register stores line item cost of goods based on your company wide preference. In our example, our Venture user uses Standard Cost in the invoice register. What they wanted to know was what the invoice register would look like if they used Last Cost. This application was specific to tracking the difference between in warehouse cost goods (with a freight factor) vs. first cost of goods (no freight applied).

select

sum(

	case

		when c.last_cost > 0

			then b.quantity_shipped * c.last_cost

		else

			b.quantity_shipped * c.standard_cost

	end

) as total_last_cost

from sales_order_header as a,

sales_order_line_items as b,

item_master as c

where a.company_id = 1

and a.company_id = b.company_id

and a.company_id = c.company_id

and a.sales_order_header_id = b.sales_order_header_id

and b.item_code = c.item_code

and a.order_status = ‘A’

and b.line_disposition != ‘Z’

and b.item_type != ‘A’

and b.item_type != ‘M’

and a.date_invoiced > ‘2006-12-27′ and a.date_invoiced < '2007-08-31';

This example could be changed to reflect other cost fields and could be expanded to report only on warehouse shipments and ignore direct shipments.

On-going Venture projects at Kelly Supply include:

http://ewins.com/
Ewins relies 100% on Venture for all business processes. A new web site is in the works to take advantage of new features announced for Venture 3.6.5. Ewins executives have already submitted additional requests in preparation for Venture’s pending 4.0 roadmap announcement.

http://kscdirect.com/
KSCdirect is a new but vital project for Kelly Supply. Kelly Supply’s directors intend to increase sales volume using the direct outlet, selling to trades people outside of Kelly’s normal trade area. As the Venture 4.0 roadmap dust settles, so does the KSCdirect marketing plan. Look to see a lot of action from these guys in 2008.

If you’re programming from within the Ecomm environment, the base URI of the VDAM server is stored in EcommConfig.php and is a define named: VDAM_SERVER_URI.

The VDAM server has a script named image_resize.php which can be called in a variety of ways. Here are the GET inputs to that script:

vi : vdam_id (Overrides ic and cn)
ic : item_code - Show first image for item code
cn : category_number - Show first image for category
cid: company_id : required if getting image using ic or cn
mdx: maximum image dimension, 0 = show image in original dims

The required inputs to the script are cid, [vi|ic|cn], and optionally mdx if you want the image resized.

If for example you are trying to show the first image for an item in Ecomm resized to a maximum dimension of 200 pixels, you would build the URL like this:

$url = VDAM_SERVER_URI . “?cid=” . $company_id . “&ic=” . urlencode($item_code) . “&mdx=200″;

The first category image can be displayed by sending the ‘cn’ GET variable instead of ‘ic’:

$url = VDAM_SERVER_URI . “?cid=” . $company_id . “&cn=” . $category_number . “&mdx=200″;

Or if you have the vdam_id of the image you wish to display:

$url = VDAM_SERVER_URI . “?cid=” . $company_id . “&vi=” . $vdam_id . “&mdx=200″;

Take note that if ‘mdx’ isn’t present or is zero, the image isn’t resized and is displayed full-size.

Venture proudly powers the online operations of Lorenz and Jones Marine Distributors.

The company known today as Lorenz & Jones Marine Distributors, Inc. was founded in 1921 by Fred J. Lorenz and located at 132 E. Grand Avenue in downtown Des Moines. With a passion for boating and a strong work ethic, Fred gradually entered the newly emerging business of recreational boating in Iowa.

Fred mixed retail boating sales and repair with automotive service until 1945. At that time Bruce Jones joined him as a partner and the company was named Lorenz and Jones Boating Headquarters.

In 1954, Fred’s son Tom Lorenz, Sr. started the company down the boating equipment wholesale distribution path that it has maintained to this date. About 1960, Fred Lorenz and Bruce Jones retired, and a new partner, Mel McKee, joined Tom at the growing firm and the present name came into effect.

In 1969 the company expanded to a new 27,000 square foot building in a newly developed industrial park in Ankeny, located just a few miles north of Des Moines.

Next generation Lorenz and McKee family entered the business in the 1970’s as part-time student workers, then key-employees, and eventually as hands-on operating management and owners.

The wholesale accessory business continued to grow and expand into an increasingly larger market area. The resulting increases in product offerings, inventory depth and number of employees placed new demands on building space.

In 2001, Lorenz and Jones moved into its current location in Ankeny’s Metro North I Business Park. The new location enabled the company to add the needed office and warehouse space to ensure effective customer service now and into the future.

This new larger location with high-rack and multi-level storage capacity, modern processing equipment and computerized warehouse system allow the company to effectively manage shipments received from marine vendors and quickly process and ship orders to a steadily growing dealer client base. Daily scheduled pick-up from UPS, FedEx, Speed-Dee Delivery and others allow next day or two-day ground delivery in most of the market area served.

If you encounter the error:

ERROR: Last month-end timestamp doesn’t exist, please fix manually in month_end_dates

The problem is in the table month_end_dates. You need to manually set the last time that month-end was last run. If there isn’t a record for the company for the current year, first set your month-end dates from the Venture client in the Accounting module. This can be found under the main menu:

Administration->A/R->Fiscal Month-End Dates

If the month_dates_record for the current year exists, the field you need to UPDATE is:

month_MM_timestamp

Where “MM” is the numeric month. For example, if month-end is failing in August, then you need to set when it ran in July. Here’s some example SQL where we set the last month-end for July 25th, 2007 at 3:00PM:

UPDATE month_end_dates SET month_07_timestamp = ‘2007-07-25 15:00′;

This will set it for all companies, and since day-end runs at the same time for all companies, this is the correct way to do it.

There is a script on vent-isco.kdsi.net for deleting items by vendor code. The script lives here:

/raid/htdocs/venture-scripts/fixup/delete_items_by_vendor_code.php

To run the script: php delete_items_by_vendor_code.php <company id> <vendor code>

NOTE: This script must be run as the user ‘postgres’

For example, to delete all items for the vendor MOENIN from the database for company 3 you would issue the command:

php delete_items_by_vendor_code.php.php 3 MOENIN

Be aware that the script takes awhile to run if there are several thousand item codes matching the vendor code, and that some supporting data, like categories aren’t deleted. So if you have a category dedicated to a vendor code, you’ll have to go into Venture and remove that category by hand.

J.H. Larson Company is a family owned independent distributor of Electrical, Plumbing, HVAC and Data Comm products which has been in business since 1931. Venture powers J.H. Larson’s direct to consumer sales and wholesale distribution web site.

Current projects include an online customer service center for over 800,000 item codes from their diverse product offerings. Venture and its components are leading the way!

http://www.jhlarson.com/