Opening balances in Arithmo or other - The Book-keepers Forum (UK)

newtobooks · Newbie

Opening balances in Arithmo or other

Wella · Expert

Hi Newtobooks

I'll have a go at explaining the basics.
The table shows where to put the amounts.
You can see there is a Suspense entry to make them balance. This is the difference between the debit and credits and is the amount of things you spent the money on

You probably haven't got all the figures you need to make it balance (assets that have been bought with the C/card and loan)

	Debit	Credit
Bank	1500
Credit Card		600
Loan		2500
Petty cash	70
Suspense	1530
	3100	3100

Hope this helps, if you need more help just ask.
Bill

-- Edited by Wella on Friday 2nd of April 2010 03:23:10 PM

Shamus · Forum Moderator & Expert

Hi,

welcome to the forum.

Are you a sole trader or limited company?

On the bookkeeping questions, first the simple ones :

I've got a bank acct with a balance in the black say approx £1500 (Debit Entry, goes to bank)

I have a small bank loan, say approx £2500 (If this is a loan in the name of the business Credit Entry against the Loan Account (a liability))

and I have some cash in the petty cash, say approx £70 (Debit entry, Petty Cash)

I owe money on a credit card, say approx £600

This one is different to the others. You wouldn't record only against the credit card account, you record against the business items that you bought with the credit card.
If any items were purchased with the card for private use then they will need to be taken to drawings which will reduce the owners capital account.

You say that you've been doing the accounts for years but I suspect that such has not been full double entry (the questions about debits and credits). As such it might be worth doing some formal bookkeeping training before complicating matters by changing the way that you do your companies books.

Just a suggestion. At the very least have a read of Mastering Accounting Skills by Margaret Nicholson as it might help to sort out debits and credits.

You might also consider bringing in a professional bookkeeper as the time that you are currently spending on sorting the books out could probably be better spent generating revenue. Using a bookkeeper might also help to reduce your annual accountancy fee's.

All the best and good luck,

Shaun.

Shamus · Forum Moderator & Expert

Hi Bill,

was my turn to start a reply then be off doing something else this time.

Must admit that I had to change the last bit a couple of times as was trying to be helpful but kept thinking that but was coming across as an insult which wasn't the intention.

Seems we agree on the treatment of all of the entries and that the credit card entry needs further investigation and expansion.

Wella · Expert

Hi Shaun

900 post, I am sure you are going to make the 1000 over the next week.

I know what you mean, it's very easy to sound insulting when you write a reply, when none is intended, especially to a newby, where their expertise level isn't known. I often rewrite posts (that's why you often beat me to the punch line) because I don't like the way it reads back

This one does need a bit more info to give a more useful answer but you have to work with what you're given. Such is life (sigh)

Had a fun Good Friday delving into the finer points of Excel formulas
Apart from Tescos, have you done anything else?

Shamus · Forum Moderator & Expert

Hi Bill,

Pretty lazy day for me.

Got a huge old armchair up the corner of the office and been sunk in that with a pile of index card revising all the things that I might get asked at interview. Makes a break from accountancy revision anyway.

Playing with Excel Formulas now that's fun. Don't think that a day goes by that I don't have a bit of a tinkle around with my spreadsheets.

I've still not recorded any Macro's with Excel 2007 yet. Actually, for that matter, I haven't used it for Pivot tables either.

Wonder if anyone at Microsoft would Listen if we started a bring back office 2000 / 2003 campaign! (Still got Excel 4, 97 and 2000 on my machine to support Macro's written under them).

Have you tried the Office 2010 beta yet? If so, is there any option to use the classic Excel interface? (he asks hopefully). I know that there are third party products that will replicate it but I wouldn't be able to download those on clients machines.

Wella · Expert

Shaun

Isn't lazing around what bank holidays are foor? Have decided that I will not touch any form of bookkeeping on Sunday and have a full day off.

I'm still on 2000 and at the moment can't think of any reason to change. It still works with Vista (just, except Outlook, which never worked on it) although I seem to have recently lost a function DATEDIF, which, typically is just the one I want to use. Any ideas where it might have gone? I have just finished reinstalling but it didn't come back!

Had a look at 2010 but shyed away from actually downloading it. Thought I'd wait 'till October, become a student and get the Pro version for a tenner?! I'm sure Del has got an Hooky, pirate version from China, he wants to offload

Shamus · Forum Moderator & Expert

Hi Bill,

didn't think that anyone else had ever heard of Datedif. Its one of those functions that Microsoft doesn't want you to know about as it existed prior to 2000 but was not documented anywhere. Got documented in 2000 and then to the best of my knowledge disappeared completely after that.

You say that your running 2000 though so it should still be there.

Does it still appear in the help index?

Make sure that you've not accidentally typed in DATEDIFF rather than DATEDIF as the former is a VBA function.

If it's just that you've lost the format of the command it's DATEDIF(start_date,end_date,unit).

You need to put the dates in quotes in the format "CCYY/MM/DD" if your specifying the date exactly rather than referencing other cells.

The unit field should be :

"Y" The number of complete years in the period.
"M" The number of complete months in the period.
"D" The number of days in the period.
"MD" The difference between the days in start_date and end_date. The months and years of the dates are ignored.
"YM" The difference between the months in start_date and end_date. The days and years of the dates are ignored.
"YD" The difference between the days of start_date and end_date. The years of the dates are ignored.

Very strange if it has disappeared completely.

P.S. just changed the response as the Excel help was leading me up the garden path about the quotes. Didn't sound right so had to give it a quick try..

-- Edited by Shamus on Friday 2nd of April 2010 06:21:18 PM

Wella · Expert

Thanks Shaun

It appears in Help but seems to have vanished from excel, tried all sorts and just tried your suggestions but all I get is the #NAME? error.

Weird

Bill

Shamus · Forum Moderator & Expert

Ok, next thing to try,

go to a completely fresh spreadsheet so no risk of corruption.

Cut and paste the following into a cell :

=DATEDIF("2001/12/01","2006/12/03","d")

the result should be 1828 but that bits immaterial.

Assuming that you get the same message, click on the cell with the formulae in it.

Now click Insert on the dropdowns bar

Now click Function

It should now tell you if there is anything wrong with any part of the formula.

Let me know what's occurin with it now.

Wella · Expert

I've always said it Shaun, you're a genius

It appears the problem is with the worksheet I'm working on

Cheers
Bill

newtobooks · Newbie

Hi Wella
Thanks so much for the warm welcome and the friendly advice. Don't feel quite such a lonely soul now!!
You've helped to clear up the debit/credit nicely thanks.

With regard to to the purchases made previously with the credit card and loan - this has been over a period of five years and though I do have a couple of larger items that I have a purchase value for, some of the monies went into raw materials etc and I have no real breakdown for these - just a balance to bring forward.
Any ideas?

newtobooks · Newbie

Hi Shamus

Thanks for the advice. Yep - sole trader (not even me, it's my partner!!)
Yep - VERY simple book-keeping previously, but dealing with a badly trained spider monkey at this end, and thought that if we could set things up with a relatively simple system on the computer that can produce invoices etc and keep up with things as they happen - then the chaos that is the book-keeping will subside!

You can have as many good plans as you like, but when you let the spider monkey lose with the cheque book and ask him for receipts it takes some sorting!!

Will look into your idea about the basic book-keeping. Cheers for that.
Nathalie

Shamus · Forum Moderator & Expert

No Problems Nathalie,

glad that Bill and myself could help.

Sometimes trying to keep all the paperwork under control can tend to fee a bit like trying to nail a jellyfish to a wall.

If you're not 100% with the bookkeeping side it's easy to make matters more complicated than when you started.

If its a relatively simple affair then it may be that all you need is some cashbook software to record your transactions going forwards.

There's a free cashbook that you can get from VT. Their website is http://www.vtsoftware.co.uk/index.html

It's nothing that you couldn't do yourself in Excel but using the VT software is a very small step on the route to understanding a bit more about bookkeeping.

Combine that with the Margaret Nicholson book and you'll be moving up to VT Transaction+ and have your spider monkey under control in no time.... You might also want to confiscate the cheque book though!

Have fun and talk soon,

Shaun.

Rhianrach · Expert

Bugger one I could've answered and I missed it, they don't come around that often

Steve

Wella · Expert

Hi Nathalie

If you are trying to get the books back in order, it might be an idea to have a look at what was bought with the loan and credit cards.

What you are going to try to achieve is turning that suspense entry into something more meaningful.

If you have any items you know that the business still has (like tools & equipment, or stock left over that is normally sold) that might be a good starting point.

There will be other things to find out like:

Over the years has your partner put any money into or out of the business?
Do you know when the business year end is?

From what you have told us, there will probably be more questions and answers to get you completely on the path to righteousness but the journey has already started and it's one step at a time.

Bill

Shamus · Forum Moderator & Expert

One step at a time.... Same could be said of walking up the gallows steps Bill!

Sound advice about the suspense account but from the sound of the spider monkeys cheque book habit's I'll have good money on it that there's a fair few items that they can never resolve that were actually bought with cheques (5 to 1 that half the stubs aren't filled in and they don't have all of the receipts).

In that case items that may have been legitimately purchased for the business are likely to end up going to drawings.

Then again, Nathalie did say that she's been sorting out the books for a while (assume on a current year only basis) so there's a chance that she may, with a lot of digging be able to resolve all of the items in suspense.

If we can get a cashbook set up going forwards combined with that suspense resolved then as you say, job done and onto our next fun filled adventure.

Sure I've been answering the questions a lot better since I've been wearing my undies outside my trousers!

Shamus · Forum Moderator & Expert

Hi Steve,

you've got to be seriously fast off the mark to beat the Amigo's to a post!

I've normally got the forum up permanently on one of my screens. Don't exactly sit here like a vulture ready to pounce as doing other stuff as well but it's not normally many minutes between when someone posts and when I get to see it.

I suspect that Robs got a similar setup and he definitely types faster than I do... Bet he cheats and uses more than two fingers and a thumb though.

And then of course Bill comes along with the right answer.

So, it's a challenge. You've got to beat us to a post.... And no cheating by posting and answering a question yourself at three in the morning!

Wella · Expert

Never said it was going to be easy

Legitimate expenses getting posted to Drawings is, I suppose, the price you pay for poor record keeping!!

Quite agree, get the cashbook up and running now. The rest is already history, so no point in making it worse. Things may come to light as Nathalie goes along.

It's not the walk that does for you, it's reaching the destination (suppose that could be said for poor record keeping too)

I'm not sure which character is your alter ego, Del or Batman?, or is it a case of multi personality disorder (yet another trait of bookkeepers/ accountants, along with the OCD from the earlier thread)

Hope you are still having a chill weekend.

Just worked out it took 18 minutes from start to finish to get this post online. Note to self -"Must concentrate more".

-- Edited by Wella on Saturday 3rd of April 2010 04:10:08 PM

Rhianrach · Expert

Shamus wrote:

Hi Steve,

you've got to be seriously fast off the mark to beat the Amigo's to a post!

I've normally got the forum up permanently on one of my screens. Don't exactly sit here like a vulture ready to pounce as doing other stuff as well but it's not normally many minutes between when someone posts and when I get to see it.

I suspect that Robs got a similar setup and he definitely types faster than I do... Bet he cheats and uses more than two fingers and a thumb though.

And then of course Bill comes along with the right answer.

So, it's a challenge. You've got to beat us to a post.... And no cheating by posting and answering a question yourself at three in the morning!

I'm going to sit here from now on hitiing f5 till I find a question I can answer,..................... damn you amigos. wink

Rhianrach · Expert

Wella wrote:

Legitimate expenses getting posted to Drawings is, I suppose, the price you pay for poor record keeping!!

Quite agree, get the cashbook up and running now. The rest is already history, so no point in making it worse. Things may come to light as Nathalie goes along.

Nearly had to do this recently, Cash account was around £3000 over and myself or the owner couldn't find the error and was looking like they would have to dump the money in out of their pocket, ( I wasn't flavour of the month at that point).

Turns out that one weeks cash takings didn't get paid in via the paying in book, (which was how the account was reconciled) but got paid in over the counter without the paying in book, took a while to find out but hey it's all experience wink

Newtobooks good luck with your books, you'll be able to sort that suspense account out I'm sure, your spider monkey will have spent the money somewhere just a case of hunting through and finding the receipts. confuse

newtobooks · Newbie

I'm on it!! Cheers to you, Bill and Steve. Great guys all.

It's head down and sort out time. Cheque book impounded and a variety of torture methods being devised for each time the answer "I don't know" comes back to the question - "Where's the receipt?"

Glad to hear that the undies outside the trousers are paying off dividends. Guess we've all got things we can learn in life! biggrin

Thanks again
Nathalie

Shamus · Forum Moderator & Expert

lol.

Oh that we were all allowed to employ such methods of keeping our clients on the straight and narrow! Lets hope that he doesn't enjoy it too much though otherwise it may end up a self defeating exercise!

On a similar note I'm all for holding clients out of an upstairs window by their ankles to extract payment. Strangely though that's really frowned upon by our governing bodies.