PO Name too long caused ghost line items to appear linked to invoice

[Jeanette Lundgren]

This is an issue with vendor imposed maximum field length in PO Name, but perhaps a check in Evergreen could help prevent time consuming cleanup...

Scenarios:
1- library gets busy and accidentally creates a PO name that exceeds vendor max length
2- library uses a duplicate PO name and Evergreen appends a year to the end of the name which causes it to exceed the maximum length

Known vendors affected: Ingram and Baker & Taylor

Workflow
1- library creates a PO with a name that is too long
2- library doesn't notice and activates the PO
3- in the EDI, the Line Item ID is truncated on the vendor side

This results in:
1- invoices not being matched to PO
2- incorrect matches on Line items (they can be old, with a different PO name, from a different org unit)
3- the incorrect line items appear once in the invoice screen, but there may be many of them attached

Workarounds -
1- libraries can manually link the invoices to the POs
2- If they try to receive all line items from the Invoice screen they get a permission error because they do not have permission to create/edit another library's line items that was linked incorrectly.
3- One workaround is to use the detach link to remove the incorrect line items Click detach. Save. Do it again if the line item reappears until you have them all.
4- Alternate workaround is to receive line items from the PO screen.

If you have a big PO with many line items and invoices attached, this can be a time consuming process to clean up. For example for a PO with 200+ line items, the first invoice had a ghost line item attached 67 times. That is a lot of detaching and saving. See attached image. First line item is the ghost.

Is there a way a check could be made in Evergreen to match on the PO name to prevent these ghosts from appearing? Or a way to alert the user before activating?

[Christine Morgan (cmorgan-z)]

We just came across this issue in 3.7.2

[Tiffany Little (tslittle)]

Would it work to add a field to the provider record for "Max Vendor PO Name Length"? Then possibly when creating the PO name there would be a constraint on length?

[Carol Witt (carolwitt)]

We discussed this at the Hackfest AIG session. A "Max Vendor PO Name Length" might work to prevent this issue overall, although consortia/libraries would need to pay attention to the line item numbers for length (e.g. Line Item IDs 999999 and 1000000).

I suspect that changing the Attribute Set so that the Purchase Order Name doesn't get sent to vendors, also mentioned as a potential solution, wouldn't be popular with our libraries.