The Grinch That Stole Christmas - Khalix Suggestions for the upcoming Holiday Season

It's that time of year again and the holidays are upon us. In the United States, Thanksgiving means two days of paid time off and a long weekend in late November whereas Christmas decorations are already being put up in anticipation of December's caroling.

What this means for those administering or supporting Khalix systems is something perhaps more ominous: the Year-End Rollover! The Grinch in Khalix's Winter Wonderland. Only the YE rollover can put a pall on an otherwise unblemished period of data warehousing gaiety and celebration.

For those of you not aware, the Year-End Rollover in the Khalix financial suite occurs when the year's Forecast is completely filled in with Actuals and the time comes to move to the next year's time (Forecast and Actuals) periods. While this may sound fairly simple, behind the scenes (depending on how one's system has been customized), this means the execution of several fairly lengthy processes and in general, the creation of the aforementioned next year's symbols.

This is not the same as the Budget or Plan Rollover, which generally occurs in fall, but that is a topic for another post.

As part and parcel of the YE Rollover, data may be moved or removed and old time period symbols--and their data-- is often deleted. Additionally, any customized processes or tweaks that have been added to the processing will get executed and must be evaluated to ensure they are updated and the whole process doesn't come crashing down.

This being the case, here are several suggestions taken from long experience that admins should consider to ameliorate much of the suffering (I have personally) endured:

- Obviously, test all YE rollover code and data in a Development environment that has been refreshed with a backup of Production data. In particular, pay attention to the following items:
- Ensure that all Journal Entries are posted. You want your data to be correct, and often an unposted JE will not even let you run a rollover.
- Likewise, ensure that all locks have been exterminated. Locks are a sign of someone sneaking in when they KNOW they shouldn't be in there, you told them 32 times after all! Along those lines, make sure to send out frequent (and possibly irritating) system reminders to ensure everyone is apprised of the rollover.
- Ensure that all symbol maintenance has been run before attempting the rollover.
- Ensure that the timing of your rollover coincides with the Busines Users' needs to get in to the system. Sounds obvious but this could mean something as nebulous as determining if you really need a November to December Month-End rollover prior to your YE roll--what good does loading Actuals overtop of December Forecast numbers do for your organization if the organization actually needs that Forecast data for another few weeks. Recall that many Khalix clients have Consol worker bees versus Planning worker bees, etc. They usually are in two different groups and not on the same timeline.
- Ensure that time period symbols you want (and yes, this means the data underlying those symbols!) are not getting deleted
- Ensure the symbols and data you DO want to be removed is actually getting removed and not just renamed to something else. This could cause data space issues. Just because you didn't think to check all the leaf symbols under ACTUALS does not mean something ominous isn't being stored in there. (Actuals data usually is much more dense--higher atomicity--than forecast or budget data and generally contributes more than half of the size of a database.)
- Ensure that floating time periods are getting updated. This effects reporting.
- Now is the time to evaluate removing any unused or unnecessary symbols that may be taking up space and hindering performance. Remember way back before Sarbox when "lean and mean" was a good thing? Well, it still is in Khalix. Also, make sure to export and import following any deletions to be sure that you are actually getting rid of those symbols instead of just not seeing them; i.e. Khalix's form of smoke and mirrors.
- Check those server rules for any explicitly named leaf or parent symbols that could get changed by the rollover. Remove any rules you no longer require.
- Check that group and user-specified settings are getting updated with the new year's settings, if any.
- In data warehousing situations, ensure that there is a place for you to send the new year's data (that they can handle your new time periods). Likewise, ensure that your in-flows are updated to the new symbol names to ensure that you can import them.
- Ensure that that one crazy user is locked out of the system during your updates.
- Finally, and perhaps most importantly, make sure that you take that almighty backup before you press the button!

If you follow at least some of this advice, you will have done well.

Good luck and don't let the Grinch ruin your season! Ho ho ho!
- Santa