I have a new customer who hasn't kept particularly good manual records - he has asked me to go back to 2008 and enter everything to Sage to produce him some management accounts - he's never had any before! I am actually enjoying unravelling everything but I have hit a problem and do not know the best way to deal with it:
I am posting items from the bank statements and unfortunately I don't have any of the old cheque book stubs and paying-in books. I have managed to match most of them up to supplier/customer invoices but I'm not sure how to account for those I cannot identify. Should I create new nominal codes - one for receipts and one for payments and then journal the amounts to the creditor/debtor control accounts? Should I create a 'cash' bank account and use that? How do I then take care of the outstanding invoices on the system?
The information produced can only ever be as good as the underlying data so if that is flawed or missing as this is Management rather than financial accounting does it actually undermine the whole excercise?
How material are the figures both individually and in agregate?
You may need to produce best and worst case estimates from the available information which may not actually be what the client is looking for.
In addition to the invoices that you have already matched up sure that you have also already looked at the PAYE records to identify those payments.
For cheques where there is absolutely no way to determin who the payee was by any other means then the client could if they wished get the cheques back again from the bank (they will be in India at the moment) but there will be a cost involved in that so the question then is whether the excercise justifies the cost.
Hope that you manage to retreive all of the information that you need to,
kind regards,
Shaun.
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Shaun
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