What does that radio button do?

I try to be clever and/or funny by putting a cryptic title for my posts, I think it’s my attempt to make Financial Software sound fun, perky and exciting (which it is of course). Probably the real result is for some people to get here from google (or Yahoo – do they still do search?) and be very disappointed, in fact they are probably hitting the back button right now. WordPress can show me what searches people did that got them to my page and without going into the details let me tell you that my posts about the Intercompany Periods feature (why do I need another Period?) and my musings about clearing my desk to move office (Cleaning out my Closet?) have probably been read by many confused young people and I apologize to them if they are now here reading this too. Right now those of you who know this is a blog about Oracle Financials are probably wondering when they can stop skimming the preamble and I might get to something of use or interest, so without further ado…

I was working with some AGIS users creating an Intercompany transaction from the entry screen when somebody asked “What does that radio button do?” I realized nobody in the room fully understood the feature. Automatic distribution mode is essentially an aid to ease the amount of data entry you have to make. If you’re creating a transaction batch with multiple transactions (ie. multiple recipients) you’ll have a set of initiator (that will be you as you are entering the batch) accounting distributions for each of the transactions in the batch. Now if I have a batch with dozens or hundreds of transactions in and I want each of those transactions distributed to the same accounts, entering them manually against each transaction will take some time. So if I select automatic distribution mode you just enter your initiator distributions once and the batch header level and when you submit we will prorate those down to all teh transactions in the batch. So you can save a lot of key strokes entering transactions.