I am currently a Sage user but really impressed with the QF system so have done my last quarters books in QF as well as Sage to see how I get on. I am now at the End of Year point, but before I run the end of year procedure I hoped someone could tell me the effect of the lock that this will put on the accounts.
For instance, I run the year end to 30/06/16 sometime in July 2016 then find some old purchase invoices dated June 2016 (last year, now locked). This expenditure will obviously need to be attributed to the new 2016/2017 year as the accounts are “Done” for the previous year. Do I enter the purchases with the correct June date and does QF have a mechanism for dealing with this (as it does with VAT) or will I have to enter them with a date in the now current year (which will NOT be the date on the purchase invoice)?
The year end lock just prevents you editing or adding to any entries in the locked period. It can be removed at any time, so if you do find invoices in an old period, you can just remove the lock, add them, and reapply it.
If you use the simplified year end tool , it will also create a year end journal which may need to be removed before you can add any additional invoices etc. However, just like you can reapply the lock, you can re-run the year end tool too.
Here’s a few other topics I thought you may find useful:
So, just to confirm, once the accounts are locked to a date, the system would not let me enter a new purchase before that date without removing the lock first? Therefore, if the purchase invoice was so old that I’d already given the figures to my accountant and he’d done my tax calculation then the invoice would need to be dated in the new/current year in order for me to benefit from it’s P/L value?
Seems prudent to hold on as long as possible before closing a year.
You shouldn’t really date the invoice for a different date other than the one shown on the copy you’ve received, as it’s normally a tax point date too. However, I’d always recommend double checking things like this with your accountant (I’m not one) to find out the actual effect it would have on your accounts.
If incase you have locked a period and found an invoice which needs to be input and you have not paid your tax, so then it should not be an issue. But say if you have already paid your tax on the period in question, you can enter that invoice into the new period with the day you enter it, but with a remark showing the invoice date.
Now the question comes if you have paid for the invoice or not. If you have already paid in the last period then you would have to raise a journal entry to clear that amount and to match your bank statement.
So in short opening a period once accounts have been sent to the tax office and then fiddling with it, is not advised.
Regards
OK, Thanks for the responses. I thought it would work this way but just needed to make sure. As someone that that used to do manual book keeping (paper ledgers) and used GnuCash software quite a lot I get a bit OCD about knowing what happens to my data.
