Sage 50 closing down the 9999 nominal

[boatbabe]

I am running Sage Line 50 2012 v. 18.1.0.12 on an exchange server accessed through Windows 7.
My problem is that at my last Year End Close Down Sage automatically wrote off the balance on the 9999 account, posting a Ledger Year End journal to clear the account to zero.
My question is does anyone know any way to change the settings to stop this happening automatically?
Thanks in advance, if you need any more info please let me know,
Nina

[brucedenney]

If you put account 9999 in the balance sheet rather than in the P&L then it's balance will not be journalled into retained P&L at the year end.

I hasten to add that it is most cases that any items in 9999 are going to be part of the P&L and are going to alter the trading account for the year.

9999 is normally used for "unexplained items" in the P&L during the year. At year end you should explain them in some way or other or accept them as being inexplicable either way they would be part of the profit/loss for the period.

I am not sure why you would not want to clear out this account or what is in this account that you would want to retain.

[boatbabe]

Many thanks for your reply. My accountant has asked me to find out why this has happened and change it if possible, as when we did the year end the items in here (which are 'unexplained' receipts etc) were not picked up and treated correctly as the account had closed down. Apparently according to the accountant this is the only version of sage that treats the 9999 like this.
I will let them know your reply and see how they want to treat it as I agree with you that it should be retained in the p&l, we might just ahve to bear this in mind and remember to look at it every year...
Thanks again

[brucedenney]

I think your accountant has miscommunicated with you as all versions of Sage 50 I can remember, and I can remember V5 of DOS, journal the whole P&L into retained profit based on the COA.

If there were receipts that you knew related to an account on the customer ledger but that you could not identify at the time, then posting them as cash receipts would not be a good idea on 3 counts

a) the debtors control would be incorrect
b) there would be no way to assign them to the correct customer at a later date.
c) you would be accounting for vat twice

The way I would manage these would be to create a customer account for "unmatched customer receipts" this would give you a customer account with a -ve balance, because the receipt is not matched against an invoice it will remain on the account "forever" the debtors control will be correct and there is no entry in 9999.

At some point in the future you may find out which customer the receipt should have gone to, so use error corrections to change the customer account to the correct one, then do a zero receipt and match the payment on account against the invoice.

It may be that after a few years you reach the conclusion that there is no way you can establish who the money belongs to and decide to write it off. At that point you could enter an invoice to bad debts to write it off.

As for your current position, you should have made a company Archive when you did your year end, so you should be able to open the archive and see what was in the account.

I would rectify the situation by creating an unmatched customer as described.
Journal the amounts back to 9999 and then raise dummy credit notes to represent the receipts on the unmatched customer account.

It is possible that you may have double accounted for the sales from a VAT perspective by recording the VAT on and invoice and then again on the receipt to 9999. In which case you can fix this by accounting for VAT on the dummy credit note and so reversing the accounting of VAT on the recording of the receipt. I assume Standard Vat accounting if you are on Cash accounting or any scheme then things would be different.