Francois Marais

One Sage One Accounting error I have now committed two years in a row was processing the right transactions in the wrong period.

In the good old days when businesses were still using cheques the monthly bank reconciliation was the number one point of control for accurate accounting records.

Youngster accountants and bookkeepers do not know how easy they have it compared to non computerized systems of yesteryear. (My late retired CA father would now remind me of them using an abbacus at school.)

But there is a danger when things become to easy. It still amazes me at the speed at which a vast number of cash book transactions can be processed with the Sage Accounting system. Unfortunately we do not use bank feeds but manually import transactions via a CSV file.

Every year when the annual audit starts I agree with the external auditors to set the lockdown date for the end of the financial year so that I can not process transactions by accident in the prior year. Unofrtunately so it happened on 1 June 2018 that i processed 4 transactions with the date 06/01/2018. The net result was small (R216.40). But to process 4 transactions in the wrong period has bigger implications. This is the main reason one should look for small reconciling mistakes and not set off or adjust to bank charges. It can catch up with you and leave you with an eg on your face.

I would suggest to avoid this transaction to regularly set the lockdown date for transaction processing.

This done under company / general settings / financial years.

For this to work properly you will need to have a system to ensure that all your transactions are captured timeously so that there is no need to process a transaction two months after it happened.

Last year I was stunned when the auditor pointed me to my error because i knew my bank accountants always reconcile and I thought everything was in order. Fortunately this year i picked it up myself. It sure is an error I will try my best to avoid in future. The change in the Vat rate has also presented its own challenges and has caused some headaches which required some extra hours. The guys at Sage One did great work in such a short period of time to accommodate the change in the system. (Its not only the Vat rate which had to be changed but the reporting system one used to calculate the information with which to complete your VAT 201 return.)

It seems Sage Accounting is growing in popularity. Yesterday we interviewed the new bookkeeper and one of the ladies told us that their (large company) is also moving to Sage Accounting. It should not be so surprising but it is. Often simple is better. But beware of relaxing too much and not looking for human errors. This blog's title might be misleading. Let's call it clickbait, lol!