Loading Bills

You can automatically load your bill data into Archibus using the Archibus Connectors by running the Load Bills task. This is an alternative method to manually entering bills using the Enter Bills task. Your System Administrator defines Connectors based on the sample Connector provided for loading bills, and can schedule Connectors to run on a regular basis. However, you can run the Connectors to automatically load bills at any time using the Load Bills task.

You can select multiple Connectors and load them at one time by running the Load Selected Connectors action. Since different vendors and bill types typically require different Connectors, deployments usually require multiple Connectors. If you select multiple connectors to run using “Load Selected Bills”, the bill load process continues even if one or more connectors fail. After all connectors have executed, if one or more connectors failed, the log file opens and the error message from the last failed connector displays. For messages from other failed connectors, you can check the log file.

When you run the Load Bills action, the Connectors run. When the job completes, the application displays the job status. You can view the log file to ensure that data was loaded as expected, or to troubleshoot problems if any occur.

Note: If a connector encounters a problem with a given record, the connector will fail and stop loading. You can troubleshoot the problem and run the load action after correcting the problem. See Troubleshooting the bill loading.

Procedure - Loading Bills

To load bills

Select the Load Bills task in one of the following ways:
- Cost Administrator / Load Bills task.
- Accounting Supervisor / Load Bills task.
Do one of the following:
- To Load Bills for multiple Connectors, select their check boxes in the Select Bill Connectors pane, and click Load Selected Bills.
- To load bills for a single Connector, select the Connector in the Select Bill Connector pane. In the View Bill Connector pane, click Load Bills.
When the job completes its processing status is shown. One of the following occurs:
- If the job fails, an error message appears and the log file is displayed. Click OK to dismiss the error message and to view the log file.
  - You can also check the archibus.log for more details.
  - If necessary, fix the source file (XLS or EDI) data or the connector definition, and repeat step 2.
- If the data import succeeds, the message “Job Complete – 100%: Success” displays. Click OK.
After successfully loading the bills, click View Log to view/inspect the connector job log file. Make sure that the data was loaded as expected, and that any skipped records were intentional.

Troubleshooting the bill loading

If there were any issues with the import:

To import records that were skipped or missed, remove all the imported records from the spreadsheet, leaving only those that were skipped or missed, and go back to Step 2 in the above procedure for loading the bills.
To re-import any records that were imported, first remove them from the bill, bill_line, bill_archive, and bill_line_archive tables, then go back to Step 2 in the procedure for loading bills.
Examine calculated fields in the bill and bill_line tables to make sure calculations were performed. Any of the numeric values in these tables might involve calculations at the connector level, for example, for unit conversions. The numeric fields in the Bills (bill) table contain values calculated from the Bill Line (bill_line) records.