Lookup by the whole vendor name, address, zip code, telephone 1 or 2, contact name and more. Plus, search multiple fields at the same time, such as telephone 1 and telephone 2, or vendor name and contact name. ACK - Enhanced Vendor Lookups allow you to look it up your way.

To create Custom A/P Lookups, you must also have enhancement AEL - Expanded Vendor Lookups, then you must follow these three steps:

1. Select the fields you want to use to look up your vendors using Set Lookup Key Formats.

2. Create special auxiliary files using Rebuild Keys.

3. Select the fields to be displayed in each lookup box using Set Lookup Display Formats.

After following these steps, your new enhanced lookups will work at any vendor prompt in Accounts Payable or Purchase Order.

Step 1 - Set Lookup Key Formats

To select the fields you want to use to look up your vendors, select Maintain A/P Options from the Maintenance Program menu, then select L - Set Lookup Options:

+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
|+==================================================================+|
||APMAINT1            Maintain A/P Options         COMPANY ID: SP   ||
||07/10/96         Software Professionals Inc.     GENERATION #: 62 ||
|+==================================================================+|
|           +=========== Program Options ===========+                |
|           |  O - Set Module Options               |                |
|           |  P - Set Printer Assignments          |                |
|           |  L - Set Lookup Options               |                |
|           +=======================================+                |
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+

After selecting Set Lookup Options, the following screen will display:

+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
|+==================================================================+|
||APMAINT1             Set Lookup Options          COMPANY ID: SP   ||
||07/10/96         Software Professionals Inc.     GENERATION #: 62 ||
|+==================================================================+|
|                 +========= Lookup Options ==========+              |
|                 |  K - Set Lookup Key Format        |              |
|                 |  R - Rebuild Keys                 |              |
|                 |  D - Set Lookup Display Format    |              |
|                 +===================================+              |
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+

Select K - Set Lookup Key Format from the menu and a prompt will appear for Key Code. Press F2 -Lookup and you will see a list of available Key Codes.

To look up vendors by fields other than Vendor ID, Key Codes must be set up to point to the fields for looking up vendors. Some Key Codes have already been created and are available as additional enhancements. These include...Vendor Name, Telephone Number, Contact and Address 1.

To create a custom look up, you must select a numeric Key Code (1 thru 9) and specify the field to be used to look up vendors. After selecting a Key Code, you will see the following screen:

+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|+========================================================================+|
||APMAINT1               Maintain A/P Options          COMPANY ID: SP     ||
||07/10/96           Software Professionals, Inc.      GENERATION #: 00   ||
|+========================================================================+|
|Key Code........: 1                                                       |
|Sort Group......: 1                                  Maximum Width:   40  |
|Force Upper Case: N                                  Current Width:    0  |
|                                                     Available....:   40  |
| Field  Start  Width                                                      |
|                                                                          |
|                                                                          |
|                                                                          |
|   Accept (Y/N) N                                                         |
| F1-Help      F2-Lookup      F5-Ins Line      F6-Del Line      F10-Done   |
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+

When setting up a custom Key code, you would normally leave Sort Group at the same value as the Key Code. (For information on combining fields to be searched at one time, see Advanced Topics: Multiple Key Codes For One Sort Group discussed later in this document.)

Set Force Upper Case to Y, to force all fields starting with the same letters to be sorted together, regardless of whether they are upper or lower case. This is helpful when using a field such as vendor Name that has a combination of lower and upper case letters.

In the Field column, enter the code for the field you want to use to look up your vendors. You can press F2 - Lookup to see a list of available fields. After selecting the field to look up by, the Start and Width columns will be set to default values. Normally, these fields would not be changed. (For information on using Partial Fields for searching, see Advanced Topics: Using Partial Fields For Key Codes.)

Press F10 - Done and you have now completed Step 1 for creating a custom lookup enhancement. If you want to have additional fields to look up vendors by, select another Key Code and choose the field to look up by. After you have set up all your desired Key Codes, you are ready for Step 2, Rebuild Keys.

Step 2 - Rebuild Keys

After you define your Key Codes special auxiliary files must be created. To create this file, select R - Rebuild Keys from the Set Lookup Options menu in the Maintain A/P Options program for Accounts Payable:

+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
|+==================================================================+|
||APMAINT1             Maintain A/P Options        COMPANY ID: SP   ||
||07/10/96         Software Professionals Inc.     GENERATION #: 62 ||
|+==================================================================+|
|                                                                    |
|                 +========= Lookup Options ==========+              |
|                 |  K - Set Lookup Key Formats       |              |
|                 |  R - Rebuild Keys                 |              |
|                 |  D - Set Lookup Display Formats   |              |
|                 +===================================+              |
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+

Rebuild Keys must be run after creating or changing Set Lookup Key Formats and when you first install any predefined enhanced lookups. The amount of time required for this process varies depending on the size of your vendor files and your hardware/software configuration.

Step 3 - Set Lookup Display Formats

After creating Key Codes that define how vendors are looked up, and running Rebuild Keys to create auxiliary files, you need to select the fields tobe displayed in each lookup box. Lookup Display Formats can be changed several times and does not require you to Rebuild Keys after each modification. After you initially set up your lookup display formats, you can quickly and easily modify them to get the lookups you desire.

To select which fields are to be displayed in each lookup box, select D - Set Lookup Display Formats from the Set Lookup Options Menu in the Maintain A/P Options program for Accounts Payable.

Set Lookup Display Formats will prompt you for a Lookup Code. Press F2 - Lookup for a list of available Lookup Codes. Some Lookup Codes have already been set up to display certain fields in the lookup box. All the Lookup Codes may be modified except for Lookup Code P, which is the default lookup provided by Peachtree and displays vendor ID.

If you selected User Defined Lookup 1, the following screen would display:

+------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|+======================================================================+|
||APMAINT1                Maintain A/P Options         COMPANY ID: SP   ||
||07/10/96            Software Professionals, Inc.     GENERATION #: 12 ||
|+======================================================================+|
| Lookup Code.....: 1                                                    |
| Menu Hot Key....: 1                                Maximum Width:   75 |
| Menu Description: User Defined Lookup 1            Current Width:    0 |
| Menu Sequence...: 10                               Available....:   75 |
| Sort Group......: 1                                                    |
|                                                                        |
| Field  Start   Width  Decimal Places   Title                           |
|                                                                        |
|                                                                        |
| Accept (Y/N) Y                              F8 - Undo                  |
+------------------------------------------------------------------------+

Change the Menu Hot Key and Menu Description to the character and title you want to appear on the menu when you press F2 to look up vendors. The description should describe what fields the vendor will be looked up by. This option can be modified later if desired.

Menu Sequence is used to prioritize your lookup options. When you press F2 - Lookup for a vendor, and more than one lookup display is available, you will get a menu listing the different lookups available. If you want this lookup display to be the first choice on the menu, set the menu sequence to 1. If you want this to be second, set it to 2. If you do not want a lookup option to appear on the menu, set the menu sequence to 0.

For Sort Group, enter the Sort Group number for the fields you want to look up vendors by. Normally, you should set up Lookup 1 with Sort Group 1.

The same Sort Group can be used for more than one lookup display. See Advanced Topics for information on setting up sort groups.

In the Field column, enter the codes for the fields you want to see in the lookup box. The order that the fields are entered is the order that they will be displayed in the lookup box. You can press F2 - Lookup to select from 41 available fields to display. The first field is usually the same as the Key Code field you selected for the Sort Group entered above.

Normally, the Start, Width and Decimal Place columns will be left at the default value. However, you are limited to 75 characters for total width of the display box, so you may choose to modify how much of a field is displayed, or change the width of numeric fields if your numbers are less than the maximum allowed by Peachtree. For numeric fields, the Width value includes the total number of spaces for this field, including the number of places to the left of the decimal, the decimal point and the number of places to the right of the decimal. If the Width or Decimal Places is changed, and a value in the field is larger than can be displayed, asterisks will appear in the F2 - Lookup box. The upper right corner of the screen will show you the Maximum Width, Current Width of selected fields and spaces still available. If you select fields that exceed the maximum width, you will not be allowed to save your format until the Current Width is changed.

For more details on each option for setting up Lookup Display Formats, see documentation for AEL -Expanded Vendor Lookups.

Advanced Topics:

Creating Sub Sorts

If the contents of the Key Code field is the same for several vendors, you may want to enter a second field to perform a secondary sort. For example, if you had a lookup by vendor Name, you could enter a second field for Phone number, then if several vendors had the same name, they would then be sorted by phone number. If a second field is not set up, and more than one vendor has the same contents for a field, they will appear in the order they are found in the vendor file.

Using Partial Fields For Key Codes

If you want to look up vendors by the third or fourth character of a field, or look only at the last 2 or 3 characters in a field, you can set up partial fields for Key Codes to look up vendors by that specific part of the field. By changing the start location from 001, this will cause the first characters of the field to be ignored when searching for a vendor. Decreasing the width will limit the number of characters used to find a vendor. By modifying the start and width appropriately, you can use part of a field as a key segment. You can use this to make room for additional sort levels or to look up vendors based on fields in your Accounts Receivable which you designate for special purposes. For example, if you wanted to look up your vendors by their phone number's local prefix (ie: 503-684-1555), you could set the start location to 005, and the width to 3. This will cause the focus of the lookup to be only the three numbers after the area code, with preceding and following numbers disregarded.

Multiple Keys In One Sort Group

Occasionally, you may need to find a vendor in Accounts Payable, but you do not know which one of several similar vendors it is. You could do two or three different lookups to find the vendor, but this would be time consuming. Now you can combine lookups to find vendors by searching multiple fields at one time. This is done by assigning multiple Key Codes to the same Sort Group, then using that Sort Group for a lookup display format.

When Rebuilding Keys, each Key Code creates a special pointer to each field in the vendor file, based on the fields for that Key Code. When more than one Key Code is assigned to the same Sort Group, you create multiple pointers to the same vendor record in A/P, one pointer to the record for each Key Code. These pointers are then sorted so that, for example; fields with vendor IDs similar to vendor Names are sorted together. Since two pointers exist for each vendor record, a vendor will show up in the lookup box once for each Key Code in that Sort Group.

For example, Key Code 1 may be defined as Vendor Name and set up as Sort Group "1". Key Code 2 may be defined as Vendor Contact and also set up as Sort Group "1". Any lookup display format which uses Sort Group "1" will find "John" whether it is in the Vendor Name or Vendor Contact.

Troubleshooting Guide

1) No lookups are available:

A) Verify that the enhancements are active using PeachPro Manager. Refer to the PeachPro Manual for more information on this program.

B) Check to see if Maintain Lookup Options is available from the Maintain Lookup Options menu. If it is not, and any of the enhancements are active, then reinstall the Accounts Payable and Purchase Order modules.

C) Try running Rebuild Keys. If the lookups are still not available, contact technical support.

2) Some lookups are missing from the Select Lookups menu:

Go into Maintain Lookup Display Format. Make sure that the menu sequence of the lookup is not zero. If it is zero, change it. There is no need to Rebuild Keys.

3) There are vendors in accounts payable that are not on the lookups:

This is probably due to adding vendors on the fly from the Purchase Order module without a PeachPro enhanced program. Go into Purchase Order, Enter Purchase Orders, and check that there is a number in the upper left hand corner of the screen after the word POPROC1. If there is a number (i.e. E38) then contact technical support. Otherwise, reinstall the appropriate module from the PeachPro disks and run Rebuild Keys.

4) The vendors in one or more lookups are out of order:

The order of the vendors in a lookup is determined by the field in the key with the corresponding sort group. Make sure that the first field in the Set Lookup Key Format is the same as the first field in the Set Lookup Display Format.