SageForum for UK versions of Sage 50- Help and support.

Hi, I'd be very grateful if anyone can provide me with some assistance on Sage. I'm fairly new to using Sage so apologies if my question has an obvious answer!

We import various purchase invoices and purchase payments from another system into Sage on a daily basis. For these particular transactions they are for exactly the same value and therefore contra each other off ususally in a certain supplier account.

For one particular transaction, the purchase invoice did not import correctly but the purchase payment did import. The purchase payment that did import was dated the 25/4/13 and yet did not show up at April month end on our creditors report.

As the purchase invoice did not import correctly, it was manually entered as a purchase invoice dated 1/5/13.

The problem is that the supplier account is showing zero balance as the imported purchase payment is contra'd by the manually entered purchase invoice, but both entries are still shown as outstanding as they have an asterix against them and I don't appear to be able to manually offset them against each other.

More concerning, is that the creditor report for May shows the purchase invoice as outstanding but doesn't show the purchase payment contra so the report is showing a creditor that I know isn't the case.

I have noticed that when I look at the purchase payment in Maintenance Corrections and click Edit Details, the purchase payment doesn't show any purchase invoice under the "Allocations" section and also doesn't have the "Paid in full" flag ticked. I sure this is the main problem but I am unsure how to overcome this issue. It may well be that the import process we do also didn't fully work for the purchase payment.

Ultimately, I'd like to know how to:-

1.Contra the two entries against each other so they no longer have an asterix against them marking them as outstanding
2. Remove the purchase invoice from the creditors report (which I assume will happen if I can sort out point 1)

Many thanks in advance for any help received

Regards

Nicky

Which version of Sage 50 are you running?

What you are wanting to do is not called Contra, in Sage lingo that term means paying something in the purchase ledger form the sales ledger or vice versa.

What you are trying to do is "Match off" and invoice against a credit.

They way to do this is to enter a customer receipt or a supplier payment (depending on which ledger you are doing it on) it doesn't matter which bank account, long as it is the same currency and the account. Pay the Credit and then Pay the invoice check you have a zero balance if they are not the same amount you might do a part payment of one of them. And save the transaction, the transaction has a value of 0 so nothing gets posted to the bank, but the invoice and credit are matched against each other.

Hi Bruce,

Many thanks for your reply. I'm using version 11 of Sage.

I have already tried to do the matching off process as you described, and this is where I can't see why it's not working.

The purchase payment is marked on the account as outstanding, ie. it shows an asterix next to the amount of the purchase payment, but when I go to bank and choose the relevant account only the purchase invoice shows as outstanding, therefore I am unable to "match" the two items together down to zero.

Do you have any other suggestions I could try?

Many thanks in advance

Nicky

When you go to the Supplier payment and enter their account, the payment on account as well as the invoice should appear in the list.

If it does not then that suggest data corruption which is BAD news.
This should have be spotted when you do your backups and run the check data, the fact it has not been spotted would be even worse news. If you need help with data errors, you had better give me a ring.

Hi Bruce,

Thanks for your reply. You've taught me the importance of "Check Data" as well as backing up which has been good to know!

I have just done check data and it came up with 1 error which was the purchase payment and a message saying "PP trans no. XXX has an unallocated amount". I then chose "Fix" and re-ran check data and after doing this the errors changed to 0.

I then was able to go into bank and match off the invoice with the purchase payment.

Your prompt has been hugely helpful thank-you, I'll be keeping my link to this forum close to hand for future questions!

Regards

Nicky

A word of extra warning, with earlier versions Sage did not force you to backup and the fix option has a habit of very occasionally making thing much much worse.

I suggest that you always backup first.
If it does make a mess of things you can go back, try doing a re-index and compress before fixing, and if ll else fails and the data will not fix, the original pre fix data will be better for anyone to use as a basis for doing a fix.

you might like to have a look at my backing up guide. Dropbox is a great method.
http://support.makingithappen.co.uk/sag ... -guide.htm