Sage Statements Brought Forward Balance

[bandonsage]

I have an issue with the Brought forward balance on Statements . It's occurring in Version 2011 but I've checked in 2014 and the problem is the same. Due to the number of transactions, there has been an audit trail clear down which removed several thousand transactions . Clients need to see a customer statement that shows all items (Invoices, receipts and credit notes) on their statements. A brought forward date has to be set as there would be too many statement pages otherwise.
The Sage A4 statement - Grouped and all items is bringing forward an incorrect balance , but only for certain clients.
After some investigation and head scratching, it appears to be doing the following.
A number of transactions for these clients were cleared down.
In some cases this leaves a transaction on the customer record labelled as Link removed.
For instance if the invoice was removed during the audit trail clear down, the corresponding receipt, which wasn't included in the date range for the clear down, remains on the customer record but is labelled as link removed.
If the total of theses transactions is a receipt of 1000.00 (CR) and the outstanding invoices amount to 250.00 (DR) , then the Sage Statement is displaying a brought forward balance of 750.00 (CR)
It is taking the sum of the transactions with a link removed and setting them against the actual value which should have been brought forward, giving an incorrect value.
The true balance brought forward should be the invoice of 250.00
Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.
The Sage statements showing only outstanding items bring forward the correct balance, but clients need to see statements showing all items.

[bandonsage]

Just to follow up on this, I have spoken to Sage support and they can't resolve it, but if anyone has any ideas, it would be appreciated.

[brucedenney]

"Link removed" doesn't happen nowadays.

This must be some pretty old data from a pretty old version of Sage.

The first thought is to get rid of the transactions with "link removed" they must be very old so clearing the audit trail should get rid of them, new versions of sage now keep the entire chain forever.

Indeed if you have a scenario where accounts never get fully paid then this can become a serious problem. I have a client who gets paid in advance and people top up their accounts before they run out of credit so nothing ever clears on the customer ledger. There are hundreds of accounts to make it worse. To get around this. I reverse out all the outstanding items on the last day of the year. Match all the items off on the customer account so that there are no balances and no outstanding items and then put all the outstanding items back in. It is an annual chore, but we use tools and import and export so it doesn't take too long.

Another option would be to add filter the statement based on the "link removed" text in the split. I don't remember where the "link removed" text appears, it might be in the usage not in the split, so it might involve doing statement that works a whole level deeper at the usage level, it would be a lot slower run if you did have to do it at the usage level. If there are not too many transactions involve it might just be easier to flag them for filtering by editing each of them and putting something to flag them in the details.

Another thought would be that the "adjustment amount" would be fixed for each customer account so you could have an adjustment amount stashed in the customer record and just alter the B/F balance by that amount when you do the statement.

3 suggestions.

• Clean up the old "bad" data

• Filter the bad items out

• Adjust the balance