I’ve received some specific requests to help people out on this, but each situation is specific to setup and data sets, I’ll talk about in general.
Some questions to answer before starting to help decide what direction to take
- how often am i going to change the rules
- who is changing the rules – do they understand the business (ie from functional point of view) or its IT folks
Why does it matter? SLA is designed to be highly modular, but you don’t have to take advantage of it if you don’t want to. A single ADR can be used in many places, a JLT can be reused within an event class in many JLDs. You can be like me who thinks I want the smallest number of rules possible ie a tight solution BUT the bad thing is that unless other people understand how all the pieces fit together, you will be the person who has to keep changing the rules! The other extreme is that you never reuse, have JLTS, ADRs used only in one place, easier for others to understand and changing one rule doesn’t affect anything else. So what’s wrong with that method? its mostly a maintenace issue and having a larger amount of seed data to maintain.
Ok once you’ve decided how to structure your rules, here’s what I do when customizing rules
- enter sample transaction, create accounting using a seeded SLAM
- review in dist links table to see which JLT was used
- if you want to add addtional JE lines “copy” the JLT that is closest to what you want the new line to be
- if you want a different account, look at the JLD that is used and find the ADR associated with the JLT, you can also copy ADRs and modify them
- on your “copied” JLTs modify the conditions DR/CR or whatever else you need to meet your requirements
- validate and hope it works! sometimes it takes a few tries and if you are just starting out there is a bunch of trial and error
- don’t forget DRAFT accounting, this will allow you to reuse the same transaction until you get it right
