Appearance
Raising a form from an entry
Raising lets a form draw its lines and its figures from a document filed on another form — a Goods delivered note carrying exactly the lines of the Requisition it answers, rather than somebody retyping them and getting one wrong.
What it is for
Without it, every stage of a process is an island, joined only by a reference number somebody typed twice. With it, the second document knows what the first one said.
The two halves
Raising is configured in two places, and they do different jobs.
1. Where the section's rows come from
On the section. Instead of drawing a row per item from the tracker group, the section says: take my rows from the document named in this field, from that document's section X.
A raised section opens empty on every new entry
Not just on a raised one. Drawing the whole group first would put an entire store's worth of lines on a note about eight of them, and then make somebody delete the rest.
2. What each field takes from the source
On the field. Three behaviours:
| Behaviour | What the field does |
|---|---|
| Seed | Copies the source value in, and lets you edit it. |
| Quote | Shows the source value, read-only. |
| Outstanding | Shows what is still owed — the requested figure less what has already been delivered. |
Quoted and outstanding figures are never published as readings
A quoted figure is somebody else's number being displayed. Publishing it would post the same stock movement twice.
How outstanding is worked out
The requested figure on the source document, less everything already delivered against it.
Three rules that matter when you are reading one:
- The entry you are editing is excluded from the fold. A note that counted itself would report 40 owed on 200 requested and 80 delivered — a figure that is entirely plausible and entirely wrong.
- Drafts do not count as delivered. A draft is a claim, not a reading. Note that this is the opposite of carry-forward's rule: there, a draft holds a reading somebody took; here, it holds an intention nobody has acted on.
- Nothing quoted gives nothing, not zero. A field with no source value is blank rather than
0.
Open drafts against the same source are surfaced separately, so you are warned before filing a duplicate rather than after.
Negative outstanding — more delivered than requested — is kept as it is rather than clamped to zero. Over-delivery is a fact worth seeing.
Closing a source document
A short-delivered requisition would otherwise stay open for ever, quietly appearing in every outstanding figure.
Closure shuts it, and a reason is mandatory — an order closed short is either a saving or a supplier failure, and those are opposite facts.
Raising against a closed document is refused. Ordinary reference fields still offer closed documents, because a reference to a closed thing is perfectly reasonable; only the New from… picker withholds them.
What cannot be raised
- A unit field.
- A reference field.
Both for the same reason: there is no sensible way to copy them from a source document. Carry forward has the same restriction.
Rows match by item
As everywhere else in Trackapt, rows are matched by the item on them, never by position. A source document whose lines have been reordered still lands its figures on the right rows.