How do people document journals in practice

How do people document journals in practice

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I use Sage Line 50, and just wonder what information people keep to support journal entries posted.

I feel I may not be keeping enough. I tend to put descriptions where possible in the reference fields, and keep hand written journals for regular postings like wages and hp.

Where I may be a bit light is on those journals which are corrections of mispostings etc.

(ps this is in business, rather than in practice)
Tom Cadogan

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By David Carter
17th Dec 2004 21:34

Need a Journals Book, maybe
As you say, there's standard journals - maybe monthly PAYE - not much need to store anything about them. Then there's once-off journals - usually to correct an error.

I've never had the nerve to tell an accountant how to handle his/her journals. However, I do tell users how to handle credit notes, which seem to me to be similar in that they also are correcting some sort of error.

With credit notes I tell them to get a notebook and write "CREDITS" on the front. Anyone who raises a credit note has to write up in the Credits Book the reason why, which invoice is being corrected, number of the credit note and new invoice, etc.

This way all the basic information you need to know about every credit note on the system is stored in the one place.

Perhaps you could do the same with your Journals.

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By AnonymousUser
16th Dec 2004 15:56

Full details of what every journal was for
Hi,

My team are expected to keep full details of why they posted the journal and what it was intended to do. We keep a file that has full details of every journal posted onto Sage.
On mispostings they are expected to record notes on the filed invoice to say when the allocation was corrected and what code it was corrected.

It's a pet peeve when analysing the accounts at month end to find a spurious comment against a journal so I have to have full notes on what each one was for. Time consuming though...

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By neileg
17th Dec 2004 09:54

Opposite view
I am at the other end of the spectrum from Chris. My organisation is large and widespread geographically. The chance of being able to identify the appropriate paper file to justify a journal is pretty slim, so we don't do them. This places constraints on the journal and often leads to a series of simple journals so that the online narrative is sufficient to describe the purpose of the entry. We are also able to put a batch head on a set of journals as well as the line by line narration so this helps. The person raising the journal is also uniquely identified in the system.

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By tom123
17th Dec 2004 10:54

Thanks Neil & Christopher
Like everything else in accountancy it is nice to see a spectrum of choices in use.

I think I will just formalise what journals are supported by schedules, and which are just documented online.

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