I’ve re-run the Balance Sheet Report for our year ending 31/03/2013 and discovered the figures differ from what I captured in our accounts, not sure of the exact date but I sent them off on 14/05. The Total Current Assest are £10 less and £69 appears to have moved from petty cash to the Debtors Control Account, which is very odd. Small amounts but we are a small charity nevertheless they shouldn’t have changed! I’ve obviously done something to make this happen but having spent several hours looking I haven’t got a clue as it’s not easy to see payments in the context of invoices. Can anyone help point me in the right direction to try and figure this out, what should I look at?
I would recommend always locking down your period after you have submitted your annual accounts. This will prevent any accidental changes to the figures.
You could have a look through your event log to see if any changes were made after the 14th May on invoices or payments within that period. If you tagged any transactions within the accounting period after you finalised the figures this would modify the balances, as would deleting payments or bank items and assigning credits.
If you are sure the figures prepared on the 14th May are correct you could just run a journal to adjust the balances back.
I noticed you have the weekly backups set. Another potential way to resolve this would be to compare the differences between the backup around about the 14th and a recent backup. These backups contain a full nominal ledger.
I’ve found the £69, 2 returned cheques. I pay cheques into petty cash until I bank them. The cheques weren’t banked until after year end, however they were returned unpaid on 16/5. I think I followed some guidelines on the forum and processed them through bad debt provision but no idea if I’ve done it correctly…should it impact year end figures? It looks like I did something on the 21/5 as well with the invoice.
I think I’ve found the £10, I deleted an invoice for someone that had left, again was done after year end. Can you advise best way to deal with:
- What’s the best way to deal with the deleted invoice, should I reinstate it and then write it off to bad debt or is there a better way? Presumably if I’d locked it down it wouldn’t have let me delete it?
- How should I deal with the returned cheques so they won’t affect my year end figures?
Many thanks
Glad you got to the root of this. Recording cheques to petty cash is not a bad idea, to make things a bit clearer however it may be worth creating another account called something like “Cheque Holding Account” and using this to record those cheques you have in limbo.
The bad debt provision is used only when you want to write an invoice off altogether, i.e. there’s no hope of ever getting paid on that debt. For bounced cheques they should leave a trace on your bank account, if you had the cheque holding account you could record them going in and out of there. The net effect will always be zero. Without the cheque holding account you could tag from the bank as “Something else not on the list” and post it to Mispostings Account (9999). There should be two postings here, one where the cheque appears on the bank statement and the again when it gets reversed.
To cancel an invoice like this you would just credit note the balance, this would leave the original invoice in tact.
I thought I’d done something like that using the bad debit provision. So I’ve now figured out that I actually deleted the original payments, hence the petty cash balance being incorrect. I have a vague recollection that I did this as I couldn’t figure out how to handle the invoice. These cheques were returned, they weren’t represented and therefore I wanted the invoice to show as outstanding again and I couldn’t and still can’t see how to reverse the payment on the invoice. How should I handle that…really sorry if I’m being a bit thick :-/
I think I am being a bit thick but I’m getting there. So…I’ve recreated the original cheque credits, when originally paid in these were tagged to the invoice. When the cheque is returned these original credits are untagged and then tagged, in this instance to bad debt provision. This means the invoice will then appear as unpaid again. The returned cheque debits from the bank account are also tagged to bad debt provision, bringing it back to zero. My year end petty cash is now showing correctly However, the debtors collection account is still out by £69. As I’m working on a receipts and payments basis it doesn’t really matter as I don’t use this in the accounts…however being a perfectionist I want to make sure it’s correct, so how do I solve this last piece of the puzzle?
If a cheque bounces then this doesn’t have anything to do with bad debt. Bad debt is reserved only for those debts that are written off as it is not expected that they can ever be recovered. If a cheque bounces and you un-tag the payment from the invoice then that invoice will become due again and will therefore reflect on the debtor control account. I’m presuming you are still expecting the client to pay you by some other means?
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