A Typical Day in The Life of a PeopleSoft Support Analyst

In my role as part of the Remote Development and Support team, I encounter a number of issues that users encounter on a daily basis. The following is an example of a typical day.

An accounts payable client using PeopleSoft financials calls to tell me that something is not working, she doesn’t know what the problem is or what she did that could have caused the problem and she wants to know why she does not getting the expected results. After some research, I determined that the problem resides in a custom voucher load process that populates quick invoice tables. The file with the invoice information loads correctly and the voucher build creates vouchers from the quick invoices without any issues, but the vouchers do not get paid.

It turns out that the vouchers that she submitted are for single pay vendors but the custom voucher load process does not populate a quick invoice table (PS_VCHR_BANK_QV) needed for single pay vendors. So, I modified the custom program to populate the missing table with default information and tested the process to ensure that it worked as expected.

Another client calls while I am debugging an issue, and says that he gets an error while doing an online transaction. He doesn’t know what the error means.

After some research, I discovered that he is receiving a .null error from PeopleCode, which explains that an object has not been initiated and so the member variables cannot be accessed. There is no way a user can understand the issue or what causes it. The problem was with a sales order, which can be difficult to debug, and the error occurs when the user tries to cancel the sales order.

After tracing the transaction, I determined that it is a PeopleSoft bug. I searched on my Oracle support and I could not find a solution or reference to the issue. Since the issue needs to be resolved quickly, I determined that the PeopleCode does not identify the PO line tied to a sales order line hard pegged, and chunking on the PO makes it more difficult to identify the correct PO line. So, I fixed the PeopleCode to process all PO lines so to identify the right line item, and practically disabled chunking by increasing the number of rows in scroll on PO installation page to 99999.

In the midst of all this, I get a call from another client to say that he needs help with entering a transaction an expense report. It looks like it is time to develop some user documentation.

And it goes on….