accounting for last year end when using sage for 1st time

[laufin81]

I am helping a friend out with there accounts but am new to sage on line 50. The bookkeeper who last did their accounts passed away last year leaving them with only a printed audit trail and end of year records. I will now have to start fresh for this year. Should I be entering last years final business position some how as the starting point for this year? How do I account for the money they already have in their bank accounts and potential unpaids?

[brucedenney]

You don't need to worry about th eP&L as that would all have been reset to zero anyway.

The audit trail is virtually useless, you need a Trial Balance.

You need to setup the balance sheet accounts, assets, liabilities and bank.

These you can do against account 3200 retain profit and loss.

You will have issues getting the bank rec to work as transactions outstanding at the end ot the previous year will not be there.

You might not even have a bank rec to work forward from!

I suggest that you enter the bank balance as the amount on the bank statement.

Any transactions that clear the account in the new year you can enter (back dated to previous year) against account 3200

The opening balances on customers and suppliers should be done using the o/b button this automatically posts them to 3200.

If you are on standard vat rather than cash accounting then all the transactions in the previous year will have already been accounted for for VAT purposes so they are all T9 now, if you are using cash accounting then the VAT has not yet been accounted for and you need to use the appropriate VAT code on transactions.

Be carefull to back date everything. During set up I would set the date Settings>Change Program Date back to the last day of the previous year just so that if I made a mistake it would be in the right year at least.

If you don't have all the information, dont worry, Sage is open item, so you can go back and enter it later in the year. Perhaps you have accountants who can give you a balance sheet later?