User Support Forum

In the process of exporting table data from PC 10 with the latest updates, I have run into what appears to be a problem with a couple of tables. in both faprior and faprevyr, the data has been static since the upgrade from PC 8.5 in April, 2007 - not a single addition or deletion. This condition is consistent in every monthly backup since the changeover date. Additionally, the famstrd table contains all transactions since 1 Jan 2007 while the PC 8.5 tables contained full transaction data back to 1997.

The purpose of going back to previous backups was to re-assemble some long term historical data. Based on PC 8.5 as well as earlier PC 6 and PC 7x tables led me to expect to find the famastr and or famstr/famstrd tables contained all the historical data I was seeking since - to the best of my knowledge there has never been a data purge on the system. I readily concede that such a purge could have been run, but the static table contents of the two historical tables has me questioning the validity of a couple of years worth of reporting - at the very least.

Fortunately, reconstruction of the tables in an independent exported system was relatively simple and the methods could be verified against seemingly consistent V8.5 tables but that still leaves me pretty uncomfortable about our current production system. I'm not that familiar with PC but it bears all the hallmarks of failed end of period/year closing. What should the tables faprior and faprevyr have in terms of date ranges? Are these tables really significant given the ease with which they can be constructed given the appropriate historical ledger tables? Should it have been detected by the system and reported?

All versions of PowerChurch Plus prior to version 9 would only hold a single year of accounting transaction detail.

Versions 9, 10, and all future versions will hold your Fund Accounting transaction detail until you choose to delete it.

What you are seeing in FAPREVYR (or FAPRIOR, I always get them mixed up) in older versions, is a list of transactions that were not yet reconciled when the year was closed. Since the actual transaction history was deleted in those versions, the unreconciled transactions were copied out to the FAPRIOR table so that the bank reconciliation could still happen in January, for the December transactions that had not been cleared yet.

Versions 9 and above don't have a need for this table, as all prior year transactions will still be visible in the detail, but at the time you convert up from version 8.5 or prior versions, you still need access to those unreconciled transactions from a prior year for everything to calculate properly.

AH! Thank you. I was expecting the content of the tables to be something different but your explanation clears up another reservation I have had with the database design: why store explicit data when it is readily derived from the authenticated source? We skipped version 9 and were in the process of moving off PC+ when I discovered that version 10 retained the the historical info. That change kept us with PC+ but this little exercise was beginning to make me have doubts. You have cleared that up nicely.

Looking through the forum history I saw some references to docs describing the table functions and contents but they were all way out of date. Is there something available covering the version 10 schema?