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QUESTION: When I run an aged WIP report for December 31 from a few years ago, the balance on this client (and many others) does not match the information on the WIP inquiry screen. It appears that the Aging WIP report excludes any entries that were subsequently written off (pre-conversion).
The problem is that the WIP aging as of December 31 at that period is not correct. Any entries that were written off between Jan 1st of the following year and conversion are not being counted. The WIP balance in our legacy system on this file at Dec 31st was $115,000.
On this particular file, WIP (fees) as at Dec 31 should be $115,000 and it only reports $55,000. The WIP inquiry has a date selection of "before Dec 31” for that year".
RESPONSE: The WIP inquiry and Aged WIP have different context. Whereas the screen inquiry includes unbilled entries as of the moment it is executed (not date sensitive or historical), the Aged WIP report is considered a subledger so it will include unbilled transactions as of the report as at date. For example if you run the Aged WIP today as at December 31st, it will consider entries dated December 31st that were billed or written-off since. The inquiry will not.
The aged WIP will balance with WIP trust and AR, especially if backdated to limit timing differences for new actions.
The date selection in the WIP inquiry is to filter for entries based on their date which is not the same as what the WIP position was as of the date selected. In this case, the inquiry will only find the entries which are not yet billed or written off, that have a transaction date of December 31 for that period. It will exclude everything that was WIP then which has since been billed or written off.
We escalated to the conversion team to discuss the issue raised. They confirmed that the reason why you are not getting the historical output you expect as of December 31 that period - you are missing the entries that were WIP as at December 31st that period, written-off Jan 1st to conversion date, is because unlike billed entries that have an invoice transaction date, the legacy system entry records that were written off do not include the date on which the write off occurred. The records in the table had the status change but not the who or the when. As a result, the conversion rule sets the status to written off using a date equal to the transaction date.
Please let us know if you would like us to inquiry as to what would be involved in programming a data base update, based on an excel source that would list the written off entries that should be modified with a write off date of....