When the Official Export aborts
You ran the Official Export, it stopped, and the deadline did not. What the abort actually means, and how districts end up running the same loop three times in deadline week.
The abort is the design
During an Official Export, the SACS Web System runs the technical review checks for every applicable data type. If the TRCs fail, the export process aborts and the Export Log lists the exceptions that stopped it. Nothing is broken; the system is doing exactly what it promises, which is to refuse to certify data that has not passed or been explained.
The Export Log is therefore your work order. Each named exception traces to either a coding problem (fix in your financial system) or a form or explanation problem (fix inside SACS Web).
Fix, re-extract, reimport, rerun
Here is the cycle that eats deadline week. A coding exception cannot be fixed inside the SACS Web System, because the system is a mirror of your ledger. So each round trip is:
- Read the exception, work out the ledger entry it implies.
- Post the journal in your financial system.
- Re-extract, reimport into SACS Web.
- Rerun the TRCs and try the export again.
One round trip is a normal afternoon. The trouble is that the checks only show you what they can see, so a second batch of exceptions can surface after the first fix changes the data. Two or three cycles before a clean export is common, and each one needs the same people: the accountant who posts, the analyst who extracts, the director who signs.
Run the checks before the system does
The Other Export produces the same comma-delimited dataset without running any TRCs, and it is available at any point in the cycle. That makes it the natural input for early checking: validate the raw export against the same public rules (valid codes, valid combinations, balancing identities) while it is still cheap to post corrections, then walk into the Official Export with a file that has already survived the checks that abort it.
Worth saying plainly: your ERP may validate account strings as you key them, and the state system will always run its own review. The gap this closes is the middle of the timeline, after the ledger is built and before the official checks run, where the fix is still one journal instead of one cycle.
Check your own file in the time it took to read this. Drop a SACS Other Export (.dat) into SACS Pre-Flight and see every finding, with line numbers, before the Official Export runs. Findings are free and your file never leaves your browser.
Run SACS Pre-Flight free