On November 21, 1998, the Office of the State Controller (OSC) will upgrade the General Ledger, Accounts Receivable and Financial Controller modules of the North Carolina Accounting System (NCAS) software to the most current Geac releases available. Agencies can generally expect improvements in screen inquiry capabilities and only minor differences in maintenance and reporting functions. Because there will be very little, if any, impact on most functional users of these modules, no training classes have been scheduled to introduce changes resulting from the upgrades. However, an overview of the changes will be listed in the "What’s New" section of the NCAS Information Guide (SIG) on Monday, November 16.

Technical staff members from all agencies were invited to a meeting in October to discuss the programmatic aspects of the upgrades. Issues related to NCAS interfaces, IE reporting capabilities, and data files were evaluated. The OSC is converting all Information Expert (IE) dataframes related to the upgraded NCAS modules and repreparing IE programs in the public and agency libraries that use those converted dataframes. All production and history files will be updated to the new formats by the OSC.

Although the OSC has already tested production activity for the P, NC23, and University regions, unexpected results can arise during a conversion. If your agency encounters any problems that appear to be related to these upgrades, first check the System Status section of OSC’s home page to see if the problem has already been reported and its proposed resolution. If it has not been reported, please contact the NCAS Client Support Section at 875-HELP.

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