Chinese Whispers

Leeds today, and sushi for lunch as usual. I had planned to spend some time looking at the structure of the phone data files that I had been sent yesterday, but I was continually interupted by a series of odd calls from the maintenance contracts manager. She's trying to use the recurring invoice module for the first time and having problems, which I've referred on to the third party support company for our accounts software. They keep asking her to send files for them to look at, and then she rings me because she doesn't know what to send them and I get a message on the lines of "I think it was an output file they wanted, but I'm not really sure", and then I have to ring them directly (and wait on hold for ten minutes) to try and work out what it is they actually want. I asked the support guy what he wanted and why, and he asked for an import file that was supposedly causing problems. I pointed out that the recurring invoice system doesn't actually use journal import files - it writes the transactions directly to a table in the database where they get picked up by the ledger transfer routine, and therefore might the problem be that she is using the wrong routine to import the transactions?

Sigh