One of the time consuming activities of MYOB consulting is digging for dirt and uncovering entries which have gone astray in clients data files.
This article is one of a series. It will direct you to five places to find your own ‘dirt’ (& clean it up rather than sweep under the mat!).
Follow the five checks below and let us know how you get on..
Check 1
On the “fascinating” subject of bank reconciliations, have you been doing reconciliations on every single bank, savings and credit card and loan account? Do you have an un-deposited funds account with a balance of thousands when it should be zero? Do you have PAYE payable with a debit balance when it should be credit. Check!
Check 2
Go to your bank reconciliation and look at all entries that are more than 6 weeks older than your last bank rec. date.
These are called stale transactions. Investigate each one and sort it out. Are there duplicate entries? Are they genuinely un-presented by your supplier, is the cheque lying in your drawer, is it an accountants end-of-year adjustment, did you pocket the cash or what? Find the culprit, delete or reverse where required.
Check 3
Check post-dated transactions by previewing the Transaction Journal (All) from today’s date to 31/12/2012. Are there any transactions which are future dated (I have found entries dated 20 years in the future!) Find them, re-date them watching for unclaimed GST and/or an income tax deduction.
Check 4
Payments made prior to the invoice date.
Go to Reports, Account, Exceptions, Prepaid Transactions report. Run for your current financial year say 1/4/09 – 31/3/10.
If you have any on the list (likely) then these have payment dates before the invoice date. Shouldn’t happen and ugly if the entry is over year-end usually 31 March. Kick the habit or if you really do have payments before order then start putting your payments against sales orders as opposed to invoices.
Check 5
Debtor and Creditor balances:
Run the Receivables, Ageing Detail report and check each amount is still unpaid. It is easy to confuse ‘Receive Money’ instead of ‘Receive Payments’. On the other side run the Payables, Ageing Detail and check each amount is still unpaid. The likely scenario is to use ‘Spend Money’ and not ‘Pay Bills’.
