Background
MYOB® users encounter errors in their files from time to time. There are 2 broad categories of errors - Verification Errors and Termination Errors.

Verification Errors - During Verification MYOB® checks each record for link integrity (amongst other things). MYOB® stores data records in various tables, for example the Card table stores basic information about each Customer/Supplier/Employee. If you record an address for your Customer, MYOB stores this in an Address table. The record in the Card table has a link to the record in the Address table and vice versa.

When checking links, MYOB® ensures a link from one table to another actually exists in the other table. If not a Verification Error would issue - for example 'Invalid Description - Cards: Test 10 of 49'.



Verification Errors, while serious, are less serious than Termination errors. Some Verification errors are caused by bugs in MYOB®, where a record may be deleted or purged, however the corresponding link is not - resulting in an Invalid Owner error.

Some users continue to use their file even though it has Verification Errors. When you encounter a Verification error, it is important to click 'Continue'. A message will pop up for each error MYOB® encounters. We recommend getting all errors repaired, as one can soon lead to another.

Sometimes a Verification error is the first symptom of a more serious corruption. For example when deleting a transaction, MYOB may complete 80% of the process before it is 'interrupted'. In some such cases you may only experience one or two 'Invalid Memo - Journal Entries: Test 2 of 49' errors.



However your Balance Sheet may be out of balance as not all of the transaction was deleted, resulting in 'orphaned' transaction lines as you can see highlighted below.



Termination Errors - These are usually caused when there is an interruption which breaks the connection between MYOB® and the company file, such as a power outage, a network dropout or by other software accessing the company file at the same time (anti-virus scan, backup process, DropBox sync etc). If MYOB® was writing to the file at the time of the interruption, this will result in a corruption to the company file.

A corruption typically involves a break in a record chain. Within each table, every record stores the address to the next record. Indexes throughout the file also store addresses to records. If interrupted while updating addresses, the address pointers will be invalid.

When MYOB® follows one of these pointers but does not find the record at that address, you will see 'MYOB must Terminate' as it cannot process this situation. Everytime MYOB encounters this 'bad' address, it will Terminate. So one corruption can quickly lead to another, and another.

Optimisation - If you encounter an error in your file, the best thing to do is to Optimise the file (File > Optimise company file). This process rebuilds the file and all the indexes, and can repair some errors. Always Optimise locally, not over a network.

Repairing the Error
Repairing a typical Verification Error involves locating the offending link and either removing that link or correcting it, depending on the actual error. A typical Termination Error involves locating where the invalid address pointer is located and correcting it by pointing to the intended location.

There are also a number of other checks to be made to ensure the integrity of the accounts and financial statements was not compromised by the corruption.

The 'Randon Bytes' corruption
Unlike the typical corruptions outlined above, a rare phenomenon occurs where something sporadically overrides valid data with 'random' bytes. The corruption is localised to a relatively small zone in the file (though there may be several such zones) and 6-10 records will be affected. Approximately 10% of bytes in the zone will be overridden.

See the image below from inside an affected file. All of the bytes should be FF and the red entries are where corrections were required. This zone does not affect the file, however when this pattern is repeated in zones where records are stored, those records can get garbled as you can see from some of the errors further down the page.



It is unknown what causes this particular corruption, and it is very difficult to repair. Since data is randomly overridden, various error are generated. Ultimately the weird Verification errors are followed by a Termination error. See the series of errors below from a file we recently repaired - 14 in total followed by a Termination.































When such files are submitted to MYOB Australia for repair, they have advised the user that the file cannot be repaired. This is because their tools cannot locate and correct this type of error. We have had 6 such files referred to us for repair, files MYOB Australia had analysed and declared un-repairable. To date we have repaired 14 company files with the random bytes corruption.

Repair is very labour intensive as one needs to manually examine and identify which bytes are incorrect and how to correct them. As a result a typical repair involves 10-15 repair cycles. Fix a series of errors, optimise. This reveals more errors, fix, optimise etc etc.

Due to the significant amount of time such a repair takes, such corruptions are excluded from our fixed price repair. If we find your file has the 'random bytes' corruption, we will provide a fixed price quote based on an estimate of how long the repair might take.