If I run the report in Company > Nominal Ledger > Day Books: Nominal Ledger without setting any date criteria, I get a list of all Journals with overall totals for Debits and Credits that balance.
However, if I run the same report and set a specific date in the criteria (i.e. all transactions dated 31/08/09) I get a list of all journals on that date BUT the totals for Debits and Credits do not balance.
Can anyone please explain? How can one leg of a Sage journal have a date different to the other one?
Replies (29)
Please login or register to join the discussion.
Journals
Opposite sides of journals can't have different dates (at least not without the data being edited using the Sage Developer Tools).
Couple of things:
1. I assume no other criteria, other than date range was used on the report?
2. Were any nominal codes selected in the list prior to running the report?
3. Does Check Data return any errors?
john
The thing that caught me out in Sage
was that if you highlight, intentionally or otherwise, any line(s) in a master list any report run will return for that/those account(s). You may THINK that you haven't specified any account but............
not always
That is not always the case.
Reports can ignore the selection of what is highlighted, and with the Day Books: Nominal Ledger report this happens to be the case.
(If you want to use this feature, the mechanism for it is not obvious, you have to have a criteria and you have to name it exaclty the same as the key field name in Sage, only then does it work, you can also do the reverse and rename the "key" criteria field to prevent this from happening on reports)
yep totally agree with the above posts.
Either some other criteria was input, such as a nominal code range (which didnt include one side of the journal) or one of those annoying things Richard mentions when you highlight a code in blue prior to running the report and get nothing like what you wanted spewing out the other side!
This is not new
I saw this problem back in oooh....1994-5 with earlier iterations. It's a bug methinks.
Audit Trail
Has the Audit Trail been cleared at all?
Based on the image you posted, it does appear to be a single journal that is missing - if you look at the one that does appear on the report in Financials, does the opposite entry appear either side of it in the transactions list. If not it would suggest that the entry has been removed during a Clear Audit Trail - that would certainly explain how the TB balances with an apparent 'missing' journal...
John
Foriegn Bank Transactions
Do you use foriegn banks?
If you transfer between bank accounts with this and dont change the program date it will post the exchange on a separate date to the actual difference
Journals
As per my previous post, if you look at one of journals that appears not to have a balancing entry in Financials, can you see the balancing entry either above or below it in the list - if not, it suggests, as I said, that Clear Audit Trail has been run which could give rise to what you are seeing...
John
Clear Audit Trail
To check if it has been run, go to Help -> About -> System Information -> Data Information and scroll down to the bottom.
As to how it can happen, earlier versions of Sage allowed for one side of an entry to be removed by the Clear Audit Trail process if it met the criteria so, take the following example.
Let's say a bank transfer (i.e. journals) was posted on 1st January 2011 and let's say that the debit was bank reconciled but the credit wasn't. You then run Clear Audit Trail with a date of 31 December 2011 - as the debit has been bank reconciled, it can be removed from the Audit Trail and will be replaced with an opening balance dated 31 December 2011 so you end up with a credit dated January and a debit dated December so the overall report balances but one for January would not.
This was changed some time ago so that entries would only be removed if both sides met the removal criteria but, as the entry in question appears to be from 2009 your client may have been on a older version then...
Again, as I mentioned earlier, find the entry that still exists in the Financials window - if the opposite entry is not next to it in the list (or very close nearby depending on how many debits and credits were entered at the time) then it must have been cleared.
John
Journals
OK, not Clear Audit Trail then...
Does the client use any 3rd party applications to post to Sage?
John
CSV Import
The only other way this could happen would be if the client did all their journals in excel then imported them as a CSV file, as it doesnt check the dates then
CSV Import
The only other way this could happen would be if the client did all their journals in excel then imported them as a CSV file, as it doesnt check the dates then
I thought that as well and actually tried it yesterday. I haven't tried all versions but, certainly in my copy of v2011, I ran an import with journals with different dates and got errors reported that the journals for a given data did not balance so the import did not work...
This would not be the case with a 3rd party import program which, unless code was written to prevent it, can import a JD & JC with different dates.
John
3rd Party software
The only other way this could happen would be if the client did all their journals in excel then imported them as a CSV file, as it doesnt check the dates then
I thought that as well and actually tried it yesterday. I haven't tried all versions but, certainly in my copy of v2011, I ran an import with journals with different dates and got errors reported that the journals for a given data did not balance so the import did not work...
This would not be the case with a 3rd party import program which, unless code was written to prevent it, can import a JD & JC with different dates.
John
I agree with the 3rd Party software import as well (its an odd jounral to split into those dates as well - dont you think!)
I beleive on the older versions of sage sort of v12 backwards you could import journals with non-matching dates on a csv - havent tried it - but guy said it was an old version.
Also wonder if the client is using old version - and he is using 2012 whether something has gone wrong in the restore process?
Import Journals
Just tried in v12 and you can, indeed, import journals with different dates albeit, as you say, it is an odd one to split...
John
I don't know the answer but... this is what I would do...
I can not reproduce what you are seeing.
Until you know for sure what it is, you really have no idea why or what it is that is causing this and It should be of great concern.
What I would do is to narrow down the search.
Run the report for the first half of the month and see if the error is in the first part of the month, if it isn't then it must be in the second.
Then halve that to the first week or second week (of the first or second half of the month) then halve that and so on, until it is down to a single day.
At this point there would not be a huge amount of data to go through, so go through all the journals in the audit trail and see if you can find one that is an opening balance, or one where half the journal has one date and the other half another, you might even find half a journal with no other half (I have seen this in data that sage have fixed after a corruption) whatever is the cause, you will at least at this point know what caused it and be able to sleep easy with the certain knowledge of what caused it.
Journals
I can not reproduce what you are seeing.
Whilst we don't know which version of Sage was being used when these journals were posted, it is certainly recreatable in v12 - the import routine is quite happy to allow you to import a debit and credit that have different dates and it reproduces the original circumstances exactly.
This does, of course, assume that the original journals were imported...
John
Beggars belief!
I hit such a problem with Sage many, many years ago, and support were as much use as a holed bucket in a deluge.
That is why I stopped using Sage and have never gone back. The only consequence has been an enormous benefit to my expenses!
Not balanced
Looking at your report above -
Are the totals £3,012,630.91 and ££3,458,444.92 just a subtotal for VAT code T9 ?
What about the T1, T2, T3 codes etc ??
Add them in and maybe it will balance ...
journals
Hi can someone please help. I need to post an Invoice that relates to quarter and recognize revenue for each month in the quarter, not all in one bulk. How can I do this using journals? When the invoice get paid, for do I match again the entries