We are a small company (< £500K sales) and under Companies Act exemptions our accountants prepare unaudited accounts.
We want to change from our current PC version of Sage to a cloud based version (all our other office admin is now cloud and we like the savings and flexibility). SageOne looks very easy and does all we need at a fraction of the cost of other packages, except for one thing. It does not do Journal entries and our accountants say that in this case they would have to do the Journal entries and charge accordingly. The next version up which does Journals is Sage50 which is much more expensive.
How hard and critical are Journal entries in preparing unaudited accounts?
Replies (9)
Please login or register to join the discussion.
Strictly speaking you don't need to post journals in sage as journals. You could still make the adjustments yourself by using dummy bank payments/receipts etc. with a dummy bank account.
Ie. for depreciation you would enter a bank payment using your dummy bank account to the p&l nominal
Then a corresponding bank receipt using the dummy bank account to the balance sheet nominal
How do you operate at present? Do you post your own depreciation, accruals, prepayments etc., OR, as I suspect, does your accountant make these adjustments for you?
If the accountants make the adjustments, do they post them to Sage for you or do they provide you with a list of journals to post yourself, so that Sage agrees to the accounts produced by the accountants? Or, as is the case with a lot of businesses, do the journals never get posted to Sage? If the latter, you won't notice any difference really as journal adjustments aren't being posted anyway.
Regardless of Whatever happens at present, if what you say is correct, ie SageOne does not allow the posting of journals, then your accountant would have to make the journal entries direct onto their own final accounts software when preparing the accounts each year, and your SageOne accounts would always be different from the final accounts.
To be able to advise whether you would be at a disadvantage and extra charges warranted, we need to know answers to the above so that we know what happens at present.
I'm surprised that Sage one doesn't have a journal facility though.
Beware
Sage One is cr*p, I'm afraid.
It is just about suitable for a small sole trader business and even then heaven help you if you actually make a posting error. The workaround is farcical.
Also the reporting features are poor.
If you are expecting a slimmed-down version of Sage 50 or Instant you will be bitterly disappointed.
Agree with Gem7321
I'm not familiar with SageOne but unless any accounts can not be accessed by bank entries then a dummy bank account is how I'd do it.
Having said that, if you tell your accountants this good news then, presumably, instead of doing journal entries, they would just do bank ins & outs, and so would still charge you?
Worth finding out why they need to do journal entries, ie what for, as chances are you could do some of them yourself as the year goes on and cut down what the accountant does at the year end?
.
if you are looking to ditch the desktop version why not look more widely at the competition?
Xero, Clearbooks etc are worth a look.
You might also save year end accounting fees too by using something written in this century as it should reduce time out for all parties if your accountants are familiar with it.
Journals or advice
Presumably the accountant is not just charging for the time it takes them to post the journals?
They should take into account knowing what amounts to post.
I would guess that the OP doesn't know what to post presently. Maybe they could learn or maybe it's more sensible for them to make most of the entries and leave the more difficult entries to the accountant.
Sage One is rubbish. If you have chosen this program it shows you need help.
Look at Kash-Flow
It is very similar to SAGE 50, even to the nominal codes, and you get a free tool that will import your SAGE in seconds, including customer and supplier details etc.
Let your accountant put the entries through the books or DIY
Whatever cloud system you end up with, the benefit is that there's no longer any need for the accountant to withdraw data to their system, do the number crunching then pass journals back to you, let them do all the adjustments they need in your books till they are perfect to withdraw to prepare the accounts.
This may be unfair but if your accountant insists on doing it the old desk-bound way then they are just creating work for the sake of it.
All the journals you quote are not rocket science, you can do them yourself, with a bit of help and, with regard to depreciation, many cloud systems have built in facilities to calculate and automatically enter depreciation from when you first buy the asset, leaving nothing to do at the year end.