Pre-conversion Planning
To save time and reduce the likelihood of errors, address the following issues before you start the GTM conversion process:
• Timing
Perform the conversion any time in transaction processing. You do not have to close open transactions or post transactions to the general ledger beforehand. However, for a clearer division of reporting, consider converting at the beginning of a new financial period.
To prevent record-contention conflicts, run the conversion programs only when no other users are on the system.
Note: Practice running the conversion on a copy of your live database. You can identify problems in existing records, as well as familiarize yourself with the conversion process.
• Records to Convert
Determine the range of records to convert. Master records such as customers and items are converted first, followed by transaction records. Records must be converted in the order in which their selection options display on the conversion screen. Finally, transactions that are prerequisites for other transactions must be converted first. For example, purchase order receipts must be converted before their respective vouchers.
The conversion programs select records by number, not creation date or effective date. To convert records for a specific date range, specify the first record number for the starting date and/or the last record number for the ending date.
The conversion programs do not perform cross-checks on your selection of records to convert. For example, for accounts payable, they do not verify that selected payment records are the ones associated with the selected voucher records.
• Code Naming Conventions
Each conversion has default naming conventions for GTM tax classes, tax zones, and tax environments. Review these and decide if they are what you want.
• Integration of GTM Enhancements
The objective of the conversion is to move your existing tax processing configuration into GTM. You must complete the conversion before you can incorporate new GTM features. There are two reasons for this. First, your current configuration does not have the data to support these features. Second, some of the conversion subprograms expect to encounter specific data values. They will not run correctly if you change these values prematurely.
• Custom Programming
For some situations, custom programming is required. An example of such a situation is the need to merge two VAT class codes to one GTM tax class code without using GTM tax usage codes.