When I set up my accounts, I created a number of nominal accounts under Direct Expenses. I was expecting these to turn up in the P&L as Cost of Sales, because in my accounting system a Direct Expense is directly related to a specific sale (which is the meaning of Direct Expense), and is therefore part of the cost of that sale and affects the gross margin.
However, Quickfile lumps these Direct Expenses in with all other overheads, which fails to account for their effect on gross margin. The work-around is to treat all these direct expenses as Purchases, which seems to be the only way to get Quickfile to account for them as Cost of Sales.
So far so good, new nominal accounts created and all transactions successfully transferred to the new accounts. These direct expenses now appear as Cost of Sales on the P&L.
The problem is that Quickfile will not allow me to delete the old accounts. It presents the error message, “One or more transactions were located on this account that must be removed before the account can be deleted. If you do not see any entries on the bank statement check the bank account settings to ensure there is no opening balance configured.”
These accounts have no transactions and no opening balance. What do I need to do to get Quickfile to delete these empty accounts?
I should also mention that I’ve tried the “Remove Unused Accounts” tool, and that fails for the same reason. I get the error message, “We couldn’t locate any system nominal accounts that can be removed at this time. Some of your accounts may have balances on them which will prevent removal.”
And in fact, ALL the so-called “popular accounts” (which seem to be very unpopular) are left untouched.
Thanks for replying. The accounts are new ones that I created. However, I’ve also tried using the bulk removal tool, which fails to delete any accounts, including ones that have never been used.
I would imagine youd need to remove the original tags but I don’t actually know. Never wanted to delete a nominal. I mean if they balance to zero why not just leave them as is?
SOLVED: It was my mistake. When I was viewing the Chart of Accounts I had unknowingly limited the date range. So although the balance showed as zero, and on viewing there were no transactions, there were in fact transactions on earlier dates.
When I viewed the whole range the other transactions appeared. I was able to move them to a new code, at which point the unwanted nominal accounts could be deleted. (A few of them also had Bank Tagging Rules associated with them, which neede editing before they could be deleted.)
Thanks for your help, everyone. Turns out it was a PICNIC error (Problem In Chair Not In Computer).