I have two connected Limited companies and Accountant has decided to change their year end to march.
One is currently Jan (so shows as start date Feb 2013 in sage).
One is currently May (so shows as start date June 2013 in sage).
Accountant has done year end figures to March and now wants me to change dates in sage and also enter the year end adjustments as at 31 March so the opening balances will be correct.
How do I change the year end please?
BTW - Its Sage professional version.
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Joanne
Winner of Bookkeeper of the Year 2015, 2016 & 2017
Thoughts are my own/not to be regarded as official advice,which should be sought from a suitably qualified Accountant.
You should check out answers with reference to the legal position
Personally I would go into settings and change the year end date then run a year end with all the adjustments - but whether that is a good way of doing it I couldn't say. Probably comes under the 'fast and dirty' heading and nowhere near 'good practice'!
You would need to run all the reports to a custom set of dates in order to allow for an over long or slightly short year.
Has the accountant not said how he would like this done?
I have extended the year end in Sage and from memory, it entailed taking the TB at say previous March (so this would be Feb-Mar in your first example) and reversing all balances.
Then change the year end to say March (or start date April) and then when this is done, input the reverse of this journal in the 'current' year......April 1st I suppose. Make sure you save the original journal and then recall it and reverse it to save some pain.
It makes sense as Sage only deals in 12 month periods, so if you were to suddenly change the year end to March from January, it would only want to look at entries from the previous April.....you want to see entries from previous Feb.Then you can just go ahead and make the accounting adjustments at March year end as provided. I would take copious back ups and reports (nominal activity/TB etc) for the previous Feb/Mar period before doing this, but it should be fairly painless.
I am not sure about shortening the period but Sage does provide full guidance on this I believe.
Hi
Thanks for this. I cant recall which year's version it is (will have to check next time at the clients) but it is Sage professional, with no sage cover. TBH Im not even sure if it wasnt their last Finance Manager who installed sage and then left with the software - bit worried about it now!
__________________
Joanne
Winner of Bookkeeper of the Year 2015, 2016 & 2017
Thoughts are my own/not to be regarded as official advice,which should be sought from a suitably qualified Accountant.
You should check out answers with reference to the legal position
Sounds like you should be able to go through the related steps to manually change the year end.....but no support probably means no Sage help!
What I wrote previously will help for extending the year end........you can find the answers to shortening in the Sage help. If you can't get in to this or don't have a log in to Sage, let me know and I will try and save the steps they provide.
If you look across on the Sage forum www.sageforum.co.uk/index.php there are experts on there that offer advice and also data fixing and year end changing services
