Just had my sage client ring me. She couldn't understand why the cash was showing a minus figure, as viewed from the bank module screen. I ran a nominal transaction list and exported to excel so I could see a running balance. It turns out the figure was positive but exactly the same amount.
I then asked her to put the next cash transaction through, to see what would happen to the figure. I watched her screen as she did the transaction for a cash payment, which reduced the balance, as it would if it was positive, and the screen figure changed from red to black.
Very strange, so I asked her to come out of that screen and go back in again, and the figure went back to red again. She repeated the process again and exactly the same thing happened.
Any clues?
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John
Any advice given is for general guidance and professional advice should be sought applicable to your circumstances.
I hope Im understanding you correctly (head swimming at mo....waiting for a plumber!) - but have they entered some kind of limit in the Bank screen? You can set an overdraft limit but you can also use this as a minimum you dont want to see the account go below - hence it will flash up in red. Check out the 'Account details' screen of the actual Bank account in sage
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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
Thanks Joanne, I've just been in and had a look, and it seems ok now. I'm just wondering if the reverse is true. The figure was just under 1500 following a cash sale. I've just looked now and it's significantly reduced. Is the red figure a possible sage warning that the cash balance is high and should be banked perhaps?
I looked at the account details you mentioned and its set at nil, but that tab is useful for checking the balance if the problem recurs.
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John
Any advice given is for general guidance and professional advice should be sought applicable to your circumstances.
In excel I always change the minus sign to red because I can identify them at a glance. That's probably why I was associating red = minus. Confuses the hell out of me when I look at a VT trial balance though!!
(Credits in red - debits in black)
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John
Any advice given is for general guidance and professional advice should be sought applicable to your circumstances.
Am I the only person who still uses brackets to signify negative values? I do this on those rare occasions I'm using pen and paper - but I even change number formats in spreadsheets (where I also use red) so that negative values are shown in brackets.
(I've always assumed the convention of using brackets was itself to highlight negative amounts - the brackets stand out when taking a quick glance a lot more readily than a minus symbol).
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Vince M Hudd - Soft Rock Software
(I only came here looking for fellow apiarists...)
Hi Ian, red only - maybe I should have the minus sign too, but I know when looking at excel that red = minus.
Hi Vince & John, I've never much bothered with brackets, I was never taught to use them (education eh ) but I do understand their meaning and VT p&l puts the debits in brackets, which I leave intact.
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John
Any advice given is for general guidance and professional advice should be sought applicable to your circumstances.
What's read as a minus sign could be the slip of a pen, or a blob of ink/toner on a printout. Brackets are nice and clear, and there are two of them as a backup!!! Minus signs are something I remember from maths, but not from accountancy training, and I learned about computer accounting in the days when the world was in black and white!! I'm still too tight to print in colour if I can avoid it. I really must clean the drum on my monochrome laser printer, so I don't keep wasting coloured toner in the colour one!
Am I the only person who still uses brackets to signify negative values?
Likewise, no. I've got the default Excel number formats changed to use brackets on my systems. Our Onion accounts pack uses brackets too. What really gets me is minus sign formatting where the minus sign is far left and the number is far right in the cell! Almost impossible to spot the negative items.
I'm with Vince and EPF John, if it's negative then it's red AND brackets (unless written by hand and then just brackets suffices)
It was almost a day one, page one, line one of my accountancy studies that golden rules of accounting are that negative numbers are in brackets and only Auditors get to use green ink.
here's my Excel custom template for numeric fields : #,##0.00;[Red](#,##0.00) (and there's another version without the decimals)
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Shaun
Responses are not meant as a substitute for professional advice. Answers are intended as outline only the advice of a qualified professional with access to all relevant information should be sought before acting on any response given.
Responses are not meant as a substitute for professional advice. Answers are intended as outline only the advice of a qualified professional with access to all relevant information should be sought before acting on any response given.
Aah, I see. The context explains all. Personally, I prefer to present as many figures as possible in positive terms. I'd be inclined to present the above with no brackets for any of the expenditure items on the basis that people understand that expenses are deducted from income. I appreciate that VT probably doesn't offer the option.
For balance sheets I tend to present liabilities and equity sections as positives. I think most published accounts tend to use brackets to indicate "the opposite signage to the norm for this category". Looks nicer but can be a bit confusing to someone expecting to see debits and credits represented consistently.
"Personally, I prefer to present as many figures as possible in positive terms. I'd be inclined to present the above with no brackets for any of the expenditure items on the basis that people understand that expenses are deducted from income."
Ditto. When I see a P&L with bracketed values in the expenses, I read them as a credit values, perhaps as a result of a refund that has exceeded the expenditure in the period. When they're all bracketed, though, I'd instinctively wonder what has gone wrong!
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Vince M Hudd - Soft Rock Software
(I only came here looking for fellow apiarists...)
I'd never considered exact decimal place allignment an issue before and nice additon of the dash for fields with zero's in them.
Personally I don't tend to add the text element on the end unless I want to prefix fields in a column.
For zeros I invariably have the advanced option to suppress zero values switched on and with VT you can omit whole rows that have only zero values (as shown in my example above).
Without the zero suppression in VT it would have been dispalyed like this :
With VT you have the option whether you want to display using brackets, a minus sign or differentiated by black/red with a minus sign (from the options button in the bottom left of the screen).
The formatting above is only for the bookkeeping package, when you go over to the accounts package the expenses are shown as positive values in the detailed report following all of the standard reporting conventions of as much as possible being taken off the face of the financial statements and relegated to the notes.
Responses are not meant as a substitute for professional advice. Answers are intended as outline only the advice of a qualified professional with access to all relevant information should be sought before acting on any response given.
In order to avoid being barred permanently for that last remark, I do find it infuriating that sometimes Sage records credits as negatives and at other times records debits as negatives in the data tables. If I'm looking at nominal ledger data I don't expect to have to know anything about context to understand what a figure represents!
Responses are not meant as a substitute for professional advice. Answers are intended as outline only the advice of a qualified professional with access to all relevant information should be sought before acting on any response given.
Fear not Ian, I've been told by the site owners that I'm not allowed to ban anyone for using or even promoting Sage
Might be something to do with the fact that the site owners are a Sage practice (with VT for accounts production)... That seems to be the way that many practices have gone although I think that they are missing out on a lot by not using VT for the bookkeeping.
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Shaun
Responses are not meant as a substitute for professional advice. Answers are intended as outline only the advice of a qualified professional with access to all relevant information should be sought before acting on any response given.
with VT you can omit whole rows that have only zero values
Nice touch to automate the row suppression. I hate clutter and often resort to putting a filter in Excel reports to do the same. One thing that complicates the removal of zero lines is mispostings. How many times do you see a 12 month, month by month display where a misposting appears one month and is reversed out the next? The total for the year is zero but you still need to keep the line in the report. I use countif to test the row for >0 and <0 and, if the total of the two is zero, filter out the row.
Onion4Sage wrote:John, when you print on a black and white printer, how do you distinguish between the positives and negatives?
Brackets. Or sometimes minus signs if I can't be bothered to mess around with formatting.
I used to prepare monthly management accounts in the olden days when all the numbers were filled in by hand on pre photocopied forms, and distributed as monochrome photocopies, and later by fax when it was invented! In the early days of my original business I had a daisywheel printer, then the very first HP Deskjet, when the only way to get colour was to buy colour refills and print the whole page in one colour! All the accounts I produced were faxed to clients. Colour is some newfangled gimmick to me .
Incidentally, it may be because I've been watching too much Star Trek lately, but every time I see the subject of this topic, I think of some horrific phenomenon in space that causes death and destruction to anyone who goes near it. Pretty much what Sage were starting to do in my final years of flogging and supporting their software!!!
) but I do understand their meaning and VT p&l puts the debits in brackets, which I leave intact.
