Messy Accounts

[Blood Lust]

I am on assignment with a company whose accounts are a mess and I`m struggling to fix it.

I have spent a month posting a backlog of transactions onto Sage 50 for their financial year 2018 to 2019 and correcting transactions which were posted using the wrong bank account nominals. This part isn't so bad although the bank recs dont balance anymore. They dont balance as I have altered the bank nominals for many transactions to their correct ones.

I also have a further 500 transactions left unreconciled from their previous financial year. Most of these their staff weren't able to reconcile because they used the same kind of incorrect bank nominals etc. I cannot touch these as that year is closed.

What is the correct procedure for fixing this as I have never encountered a set of accounts as bad as these before?

Do I match all outstanding transactions in the rec windows for each bank account?
Then manually alter the nominals for each to show the correct amounts?

If it was my company I would start their financial year afresh on Sage 50 but is this allowed and even possible?

 

[FD Capital]

I would work through each month at a time reconciling the bank then the control accounts reviewing each set of Management Accounts then once happy I would move to the next month.

So reconciling all items in that month before moving to the next.

 

[Blood Lust]

I would work through each month at a time reconciling the bank then the control accounts reviewing each set of Management Accounts then once happy I would move to the next month.

So reconciling all items in that month before moving to the next.

Thanks, but they dont have any management accounts. Its a small business where over the years they haven't employed people with the proper skills/experience to use Sage 50 properly or to know what they are doing in finance roles. It is a real mess.

I would say all they know how to do is put invoices and money on (and a lot of the money they have messed up by confusing banking nominals).

The last financial year is closed, I cannot mess around in that without altering VAT calculations etc. What I want to do is match off everything from that year on the bank recs (cheat).

Then manually go down the bank nominals (bank account, credit card account, paypal account, and some others) and manually adjust all their opening balances to what they should be tomorrow morning when I go in. Then start afresh making sure from that point onwards everything goes on correctly.

I dont have the time to do fix/work around 500 entries for the last financial year that are wrong and unreconciled. It would take me half a year to do that.

 

[johndon68]

If it was my company I would start their financial year afresh on Sage 50 but is this allowed and even possible?

Take a Trial Balance and Aged Debtors and Creditors reports and a backup. Then go to File -> Maintenance -> Rebuild Data and select not to keep Audit Trail Transactions - this will wipe out all the Financial data whilst retaining everything else and you can start again with Opening Balances.

John

 

[MyAccountantOnline]

I am on assignment with a company whose accounts are a mess and I`m struggling to fix it.

I have spent a month posting a backlog of transactions onto Sage 50 for their financial year 2018 to 2019 and correcting transactions which were posted using the wrong bank account nominals. This part isn't so bad although the bank recs dont balance anymore. They dont balance as I have altered the bank nominals for many transactions to their correct ones.

I also have a further 500 transactions left unreconciled from their previous financial year. Most of these their staff weren't able to reconcile because they used the same kind of incorrect bank nominals etc. I cannot touch these as that year is closed.

What is the correct procedure for fixing this as I have never encountered a set of accounts as bad as these before?

Do I match all outstanding transactions in the rec windows for each bank account?
Then manually alter the nominals for each to show the correct amounts?

If it was my company I would start their financial year afresh on Sage 50 but is this allowed and even possible?

If the records are that bad I'd start from scratch.

In my experience very often re-doing it properly is a lot quicker than trying to sort out a mess.