We are a small family business and last year I took over the accounts from my mother-in-law after 40 years of her inputting it all manually and moved everything across to Sage Instant Accounts.
Its been an interesting year, finding my feet with Sage, discovering it's limitations but also how much quicker it is than manually inputting across various journals. Our financial year ended 31st July and so far I've been able to reconcile the bank (1200) up to the 31st July, petty cash (1230) is correct and all supplier payments are up to date and clear apart from one balance for our Utility Supplier Scottish Power.
I know exactly what I've done and when I started posting last year I didn't enter an opening balance of £89.52cr therefore whilst I have entered all the credit and debit transactions correctly for this supplier, the account balance on Sage is incorrect and instead of it showing £4.16cr which is the correct amount, its currently showing £241.36 - A bit of a difference!
Can anyone advise whether there is a way to overcome this as I want to ensure that everything is correct for this year going forward? I do have a meeting with our Accountant on Wednesday so was going to ask this question then but as I'm working on Sage right now I thought I'd ask the question in the hope its something I can sort between now and then.
Hi Pauline,
Thanks for the response. As this is our first year using Sage our Accountant helped me setup the opening balances for our bank accounts & petty cash but not for supplier accounts, we generally have a 0 balance on those as paid up to date at the end of the financial year however Scottish Power was different as I took out a 3yr contract with them & we are now just finishing year two. Instead of adding an opening balance I've just posted the direct debit payments each month, the amount varies depending on usage and at one point in the year we were credited back by cheque nearly £200.00 for being in credit then throughout the year I've entered the actual bill amounts so instead of us starting with a credit balance we started with 0 which is what is throwing out the figures on Sage.
I've worked through it all & the bill history from Scottish Power matches my entries on Sage (I entered the wrong amounts on here...a bit of baby brain yesterday!), it's out by exactly the figure I should have started the year with so just wondered if there was a way to account for this difference so that the coming years figures are correct.
Many thanks,
Kirsty
Were your other opening balances posted as part of a trial balance which balanced, or were they just entered via the O/B button on the relevant accounts so that the opposite entry went to suspense?
I would be inclined just to enter the opening balance figure via the O/B button and then explain to the accountant what you have done so that they can deal with it and clear down the suspense account at year end?
