Cheque Balancing System

A system needed to be written to aid in balancing cheque deposits. There was no accounting system in place. However an existing computer system recorded the expected receivables that would be transmitted be EFT (Electronic Funds Transfer), and exported these transactions into an ASCII file. A second computer system existed that recorded cash receipts and cheques received by mail, and maintained these in a Clipper database. The bank allowed downloading of actual bank transactions.

The system was developed in FoxPro for Windows. It received ASCII transactions from the first system and kept them in a FoxPro database. The database from the Clipper system could be read directly from FoxPro, and new transactions copied into FoxPro. The bank transaction were downloaded and also converted into FoxPro.

At any time, there were always be transactions out of sync, so the system had to attempt to match as well as possible and warn of any unbalanced transactions that were stale dated, In addition the was no way of cross matching the EFT transfers by a transaction number. So the system created matches by using the dollar amounts and the dates to create a best match algorithm. To make the problem more complex, the clipper system had manual data entry of cheques, and would have data entry errors in the cheque amounts and dates, so the system also tried to match these also, allow operator confirmation of possible matches.

Platform and Tools

Windows 3.1, FoxPro for Windows, Clipper 

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