Posting Invoices after year end

[staceyB88]

Hey all,

I'm pretty new to sage and do not fully understand everything about it. Our accountant came in a month or so ago to do the year end, however i have noe received an Invoice that was missed from a supplier for December 2011, Do I post this with that date? what effect wiill it have on things?

Thanks in advance

Stacey

[brucedenney]

Well, the answer is maybe & maybe not.

If you want to put it in the previous financial year, then the accountant will need to be notified and he will need to make a provision for it and you will need to put it against that provision. In all quite a bit of faffing around.

If it is a huge invoice and it is going to make a significant difference to the profitability (and tax) for the last financial year then you have to post it in last tax year and do all the faff.

If it is pretty much insignificant then I would just date it the first day of this year and process it in this financial year.

My questions would be
How was a supplier invoice missed for so long?
Is the invoice bona fide, a duplicate?

[staceyB88]

Hi Bruce,

thanks for getting back to me

I'm going to put it on this years as it's only for a small amount.

I've recently taken over a Latvian Lady that has gone on Maternity leave, I don't think I have ever come accross anyone that works n such a mess, looking back trying to make ends meet with things is a right ball ache!

Not sure how it was missed to be honest, Maybe lost in the post or never batched onto sage. The supplier have literally just sent a reminder for it, my question is, why haven't they been chasing it before, why has it taken them so long to notice the outstanding balance :-/ Anyways it doesn't matter now.

Thanks very much for your guidence.

Are there any books or websites you would reccomend me to read to get to know things a bit better, as im quite blind to the job at the moment

[brucedenney]

Accounting and bookkeeping are broad subjects, you can go an learn it all, there are plenty of book keeping and accounting courses/exams out there.

Personally, I think that most people they don't need all that much detail, they just need to be able to understand the things they need to do, then need to know their company, they need to be able to answer the questions as they come up they need to be creative and work out how to mitigate the issues they find.

If you find that profits are miss reported because a huge part of your expenditure (say rent) is causing one in 3 months to look bad and conversely makes 2 in 3 months look better than they really where, then you need to learn how to spread the rent over three months so that it stops skewing the numbers. But you only need to do this if it is skewing the numbers. I came across one book keeper who was spreading the phone line rental over three months when this had no significant impact on the business, technically it was a perfectly reasonable thing to do, but practically it was just a waste of time.

The key thing I look for is the phrase "Ah yes well that is because ....." and whatever follows that because is the thing that needs to be addressed.

If you have to explain a figure, if you have a way of quantifying it then, you should be able to adjust for it and stop it from needing to be questioned, this should enable management to better find the things that do need attention and to stop being diverted by "red herrings" created by the accounting practice.

If your management team value accounts they will ask you for things you have never done before, they will ask open questions like we want to understand why branches turnovers are so different. So what do you do, turnover is the criteria, but what could be the corresponding factors we could compare that to the size of the shop, but is size of the shop really the right thing? Should we compare it to the rent for the shop, because a large shop in a low rent district will have different qualities, perhaps looking at the rateable value, or the frontage area, or looking at the location of stock relative to the volume of sales, depending on what zone it is in? The number of sales staff? There are lots of things that can/could be measured, you need produce the answers you can, and suggest recording new data for more analysis, things like the locations of stock and zones within shops are the sorts of things that small retailers with only a few branches might not yet have picked up on. It is the sort of thing they spot when a new shop manager organises stock differently, possibly without understanding the significance of the changes and you spot that branch has suddenly improved, you do the analysis you find out why this manager has improved this store, you build a stock location model of where to put things and where the zones are and you up the productivity of all the other stores.

This is where accounts stop being an unproductive expense that is "a waste of money" with "no value" and becomes a core of the business generating profits and reducing losses.