I have taken over from another bookkeeper a short while ago, and I am having a nightmare sorting the books out, apart from unreconciled bank accounts and unreconciled VAT accounts (since 2007 no less!!) I now have another issue with the chart of accounts. One example workwear is 5004 Nominal, it should be in overheads (7000), but I looked at the chart of accounts and it is in the overheads section along with other nominals including 5000's 6000's.
Direct expenses have both 6000's and 7000's. They are all over the place. It looks like what the previous bookkeeper has done is gone straight to the chart of accounts and put new nominals in there for whatever she wanted at the time and just randomly picked a number, instead of creating a range and entering new nominals within that range.
The printout of the coa layout has no order to it at all. Any ideas if I can, or should attempt to rectify this to bring some order back to the accounts?
I had a similar situation but luckily it was near to the year end, so I perseveared with the original system until year end.
After that, I took several back ups and printed the main reports, then rebuilt the database with a blank CoA and entered the opening balances into a more logical order.
It was still a bit of a nightmare but it was worth it
What about sales and purchase ledgers, can you re-build without having to re-input all of these there are loads of them each month, my year end is Sept, so still 5 months to go, but I would seriously consider rebuilding if I can because there is so much more that is wrong with these accounts. Such a mess!
