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Rentpro - Reinitializing Home Office Data

Each day, the home office transfers information with the stores. Some systems are configured to retrieve only summary information while others may be retrieving agreements, inventory, and transaction information as well. Sometimes the Home Office is sending update information to the stores as well. If communications does not occur, the home office has until the following end of day procedure to transfer information with the stores. If a day is completely skipped, the summary information will not be effected. End of Day Summary Reports are generated at the stores and, therefore, will be accurate regardless of how many days are skipped. However, agreements and inventory which do not have further transactions on them will become out of sync with the stores. In such situations, it may be desirous to reinitialize the home office data files. Following are the instructions for doing this.

Reinitializing Home Office Data Files

The following utility programs are needed to initialize the files:

COPYAGMT.EXE
COPYINVF.EXE
COPYTRAN.EXE

These programs copy from the AGRMTS.DAT, INV.DAT, and TRANS.DAT files respectively and create files in the format normally pulled through communications. These files will be automatically placed in the directory \RENTPROH\XPORT. Each file accepts a command line argument which should be the store number for the file being copied.

The following data files are needed from each store:

AGRMTS.DAT AGRMTS.IX
INV.DAT INV.IX
TRANS.DAT

These data files must all be copied on the same business day. You should create separate store directories for each store and put these files in it. For example, you could create ST1 for store 1, ST2 for store 2, etc. Once you have done this, you are ready to reinitialize the files.

Reinitialization Example
The following example assumes that there are two stores, and the home office is in the RENTPROH directory. Each of the stores files have been put in ST1 and ST2 directories. The COPYAGMT.EXE, COPYINVF.EXE and COPYTRAN.EXE files reside in the RENTPROH directory. Following are the steps to reinitialize:

1. Erase the Transaction File: ERASE \RENTPROH\TRANS.DAT

2. Change to the ST1 directory and copy each of the files:

CD \ST1
\RENTPROH\COPYAGMT 1
\RENTPROH\COPYINVF 1
\RENTPROH\COPYTRAN 1

3. Change to the ST2 directory and copy each of the files:

CD \ST2
\RENTPROH\COPYAGMT 2
\RENTPROH\COPYINVF 2
\RENTPROH\COPYTRAN 2

4. Go into the Home Office System and go into communications. When your communication program loads, abort the program (usually by hitting the Escape key). When you exit your communication package, Rentpro will automatically scan for new files. It will find the files you put there using the utility program and read them, updating your system.

5. Run FIXILINK.EXE and FIXTLINK.EXE from the Rentproh directory to relink inventory to agreements and transactions to inventory and agreements.

6. If you want to relink the end of day summary reports to the transactions for its date, use the utility FIXSLINK.EXE. This utility may be downloaded from http://www.bestware.biz/files/fixslink.exe.

Keep in mind that this procedure does not rebuild your summary files (End of Day Summary Reports). It is not usually necessary to update these files. However, if you want to update them, you may copy the summary files from each store and rename them appropriately on the home office system. At the store, the file name is SUMMARY.DAT, and at the home office, they are HOSx.DAT where x is the store number. For example, for stores 1 and 2, copy SUMMARY.DAT for store 1 to HOS1.DAT and copy SUMMARY.DAT for store 2 to HOS2.DAT. Note that the consolidated reports for each day cannot be recreated. Only the last end of day can create a consolidated report.