Production Periods

In addition to run numbers, another more familiar piece of data that the system uses is production year and production periods. The production year and period is simply the month for which expenses are being charged, or for which you are being paid for revenue. As you enter revenue and expenses into the system, you are also assigning them into a specific production year and period. In addition to run number reporting, many reports allow you to view data for a specific production year and period. Any given run can contain information from many different production periods. Entries from multiple production periods will be combined together for processing, since they are all being processed during the same run. Most reports for a given run will also list what production year and period is associated with each entry. If during data entry, you omit the year and period, the system assumes that you want the entry in the system, but don't want to process it yet, so it sends it to the allocation file, which is a holding file for items waiting to be processed. They will stay in the allocation file indefinitely until you assign them a production period and release them into the new run for processing. See the section on Allocation File for more detail on how to release something from the allocation file.