I just started setting up QuickFile. Until now we just had a bank statement for the accountant to work from. When preparing our statutory accounts for Companies House, re our first accounting period (2021-2022) our (former) accountant made an adjustment to include four items that that post-dated the end of the accounting period (i.e. they appear in the next accounting period 2022-2023). They are two Companies House webfiling submission fees and two fees of the accountant’s, all of which were referable to the previous accounting period.
I need to reflect that so that those four items are not included as expenses in the Profit & Loss account for the accounting period in which they were paid. I asked ChatGPT and it told me simply to edit the dates of the QuickFile purchase records to a date in the preceding accounting period, but I suspect that’s ChatGPT hallucinating ! Is it a case of using journals ?
This would be a case for an auto reversing journal.
Assuming you’ve recorded the costs as purchases in the year when you made them, but you want them to show in P&L for the previous year, then you would create a journal at the end of the prior year that does a debit to the relevant expense codes and the matching credit to “accruals”. Set the journal to auto reverse in the current year, either just on the first day of the current year (the day after the original journal) or on the date when you actually recorded the purchases for these costs.
The effect of the reverse journal will be to remove the liability from the “accruals” account and cancel out the effect of the purchase(s) in the current year.