Q: Why do I get the message, "No historical bills were found" for the Bill Date I entered?
A: There are two possible reasons for this. The obvious one is that no bills were printed with that Bill Date. You can use the Matter Ledger to find the Bill Date of a bill. Or, you can click the Index button on the Historical Bills window to pick a date from the list of dates on which bills were printed. Select All Matters to see which bills were printed on the selected date.
If the date is correct and you still can't print the bill, there is probably a data file missing.
The list created by the Index button comes from the RTG Bills database, which has a list of the bills that have been printed for all matters. It does not guarantee that the file needed to reprint the bills exists. Historical bills are saved in files so they can be reprinted. If those files have been lost, you won't be able to reprint the bills.
The historical bills files are in the Oldbills folder, inside the Data Location where RTG Bills data files are located. You can find the Data Location by choosing Setup > Database in RTG Bills. (DO NOT change this value.)
You can look in that location to see what files are there. They are named by the year, month, and day:
YYYYMMDD.bil
For example, the file 20120116.bil contains all the bills with a Bill Date of 1/16/2012.
You might find that files before a certain date are missing. That sometimes happens if a firm moves RTG Bills to a new computer and fails to move the Oldbills folder along with the other data files. This won't happen if you use our recommended procedure: