Problem: When importing bills using a bill import spreadsheet, the EnergyCAP bill importer is designed to read the flag in the ACE column to determine how it should handle the bill.  If the flag is set to a value of A, then EnergyCAP will treat the bill being imported as the ACTUAL bill for that Account, Vendor, Start Date, End Date combination.  Therefore, if a bill already exists in EnergyCAP with the same values as the imported bill, the existing bill will be overwritten with the one that is imported.  If the bill that gets overwritten happens to be a master bill (defined as a bill which has been split to one or more other accounts), the split bills that may have been created from it will NOT be deleted.  While many things in EnergyCAP cause cascade effects, this is not one of them.  Since the newly imported master bill is treated as a new bill and therefore does not inherit any of the characteristics of the master bill it overwrote, EnergyCAP does not know that a bill similar to it was previously split.  And so if the user splits this newly imported master bill, EnergyCAP will NOT overwrite the split bills created from the old overwritten master bill.  Instead, it ADDS the newly created split bills to the already existing split bills.  This can cause double counting of bills and should be corrected.

Solution:  There are essentially two options for correcting this issue.  The first is to review the bill import file for any known master accounts before importing.  If there are master accounts, and you know that you are reimporting bill data (for one reason or another), the user should take care to go to each bill that would be overwritten on master accounts and "Unsplit" those bills.  Refer to the Help Manual on the topic of Unsplitting a Bill. Then import the new master bills and split them.  Because you've unsplit the existing master bills, there won't be any double counting issues. 

The second option would be to catch the duplicate bills after the import of the new master bills. You can do this by running audit 46 on your imported bills.

Written by: Ryan T. Ohlson on 2/21/2010