End of Period and End of Year Procedures (Accounts Receivable/Payable)

Banking

Some types of book-keeping are simpler if you do not need to reconcile unbanked receipts at the end of a period, especially the last day of the financial year.

• Bank everything you have, including cash, as late as possible on the last working day of the financial year.

• If you need to keep some cash in the till, count it and write it down.

Drafts

Review the draft transactions using Enquiries and set Status to Draft. Draft transactions do not affect reports, the BAS or any other part of the system so cleaning up the list of draft transactions is not critical from that point of view. However, if you have created drafts and not deleted or committed them, chances are there was a good reason. There may be some invoices you have forgotten to commit.

• Check each draft in turn, and refer to the relevant staff member for the reason it was created and not committed or deleted.

Stocktake

• Conduct a stock-take and enter the overs and unders using Stock Control, Stock Adjustments. Note that stock adjustments can be back-dated, so while it is necessary to conduct your physical stock-take as close as possible to 30 June, it is not necessary to enter the adjustments that quickly. This can be done more leisurely.

• When completed, print a stock on hand list back-dated to 30 June.

Ending the Period

Cadzow 2000 does not have traditional period or year ends. All reports are date critical and so you may back-date or forward-date entries to obtain the desired effect, and can mix dates as required, for example if you are still posting entries into June while you continue processing in July.

However, this creates the difficulty that, if a user back-dates an entry into a prior period, once that period is considered to be completed, re-generating any reports for that period will not match with previous copies due to the extra entries added.

• To ensure the integrity of prior period reporting, once the year or period is “finished”, users can be prevented from inadvertently back-dating entries into prior periods by setting date policies.

  This ensures that mistakes in prior periods cannot be made; if a legitimate error is discovered, it is simply posted into the current period. (There is always a point at which corrections to prior periods must simply be made into the current period.)

• If you must back-date the entry, change the date policy, make the correction, and set the policy back to the original setting.

Backing Up

Cadzow 2000 does not delete or archive old entries, so there is no specific need to back up, at, say, precisely 5pm on the last day of each month in order to obtain “monthly backups”. Reports for prior periods may be produced simply by choosing the date range required. It is not necessary to restore backup files to obtain access to old data.

However, backing up is still a vital part of maintaining your system and backups must be made more frequently than monthly or yearly.

• The end of the month can be used as a reminder to back up to an archive media (such as CD-R) rather than the normal reusable/rewritable media (tape or ZIP) that you may use on a daily basis. Using a cycle of reusable media for a few weeks and making permanent archival copies every month is a good scheme. This provides an inexpensive archive of your data without being overburdened with disks to store.

Printing Reports

Cadzow 2000 does not delete or archive old entries and reports for prior periods may be obtained simply by choosing the date range required. Therefore there is very little need to print hardcopy reports for later reference.

However, if you are reporting to an outside party, such as your accountant, certain reports that may be useful are:

• Debtors Trial Balance (Accounts Receivable, Accounts Receivable Trial Balance) and
  Creditors Trial Balance (Accounts Payable, Accounts Payable Trial Balance)

  The trial balance is available in a traditional form (customers) and other forms. Of interest to your accountant may be the List by Analysis Groups (ex tax) version which shows how the trial balance is comprised and can be useful for constructing closing entries. To see the other options for the trial balance, click Show Advanced Options on the Step 2 of 2 screen.

• Accounting Summary Report (Accounting, Accounting Summary Report)

  This report is an all-in-one summary of accounting information including sales and purchases broken down into analysis groupings, accounts receivable/payable balances, stock adjustment volumes, receipts and unbanked receipts.

• Stock on Hand (Stock Control, Enquiries — Stock/Services)

  Choose the stock you wish to include (if not all), and click Next. Click the Stock On Hand Report tab and choose the type of report required and the date at which you wish the report to be generated. (Note that back-dated stock on hand reports always use the “current” stock cost.)

• Business Activity Statements (Accounting, Generate Business Activity Statement)

  Your accountant may wish to see your BAS calculations during the year. Simply select the period required under Choose BAS and click Print/Preview Tax Summary Report. If you only require a summary version, de-select Show Details. BAS reports can be very long so it may be more appropriate to save the report as a Snapshot file rather than hardcopy.