Aged Creditors and Creditors Control do not balance

waxbutterfly

Hiya I am trying to deal with an ongoing problem with out Aged Creditors Report not balancing to the Creditors Control Account and I am drawing a blank now as to how to deal with it .

We are using Sage MMS.

The Aged Creditors Report is higher than the Creditors Control.

We have two new FCs who were not around last time a year end was reached and neither of them know whether this was checking in previous year end procedures, therefore the problem could go back as far as 2001.

So far we have run a complete integrity check, I have balanced the deferred postings which did alter the difference slightly. I have tried importing the whole of the control account into Excel but there is too much data to be held in one spreadsheet and both accounts have been gone through with a fine toothed comb to try and find any obvious postings that are incorrect. I have been wotrking with our sage Helpdesk support people who are positive its not a system fault (and now I'm not too sure). There is no logical way somethign could of been coded to the PL and not of been entered into the Control Acc or vise versa.

Do you have any suggestions as to how I can look at this problem in a new light to try and find the errors?

Thanks:confused1:

sheelagh

Aged creditors

I have encoutnered two reasons for this will be
1) a journal posted to the creditors control account - Sage will display a warning if you try to do this, but it won't prevent you posting the journal
2) Transactions allocated to each other where there is one transaction before, and one after the period end - eg allocating a credit note or a payment on account to an invoice. If the Aged Creditor Report is higher, I think it is nore likely that the invoice would have the later date.

I have read about a third reason, but I regret I can't remember what it is.

Does the difference change? Or is it always the same at each period end?
If it's always the same, have you tried searching for that amount in Financials? That might give you a starting point, and maybe even tell you which transaction is casuing the problem.

You clearly have a lot of data to wade through so a good first step would be to narrow down the data you need to look at.
First, run a TB and aged creditors report for the end of each month and compare the balances. You will need to use Transactional TB when you go back before your current financial year.
Hopefully you will find a point where they agree, and a point where your difference emerges.
You can then narrow down by day (between the above two points) using the transactional TB reports and hopefully you will discover which day the error occured in. Then you only have one day's worth of transactions to reconcile.

Good luck

Sheelagh

PGM

I suppose point 2 would need to be in the current period or else the problem would right itself eventually?

I'd agree best to find the exact period its out, then put creditors control and purcahse ledger on a spread sheet. Side by side, data sort and hopefully it won't be too hard to spot the difference.

Poodle

Hi.

If you run a TB and an aged debtors with todays date and no variables selected then timing differences with allocations should be elliminated and If the two balances still do not agree then the most likely difference is as sheelagh says that a journal has been posted to the control account in error.

Have the two ever agreed? If they have then export the whole of the debtors control account into excel from the date that they did agree to date and then do a search for 'JC' or 'JD' entries this should help in sorting this out.

If the two have never agreed then another option could be that the opening journal when you first started using Sage was incorrect.

However, how significant is the difference? If it is taking you a long time to sort this out then you should consider the cost of your time against the difference and perhaps just force the two to agree by writing off a journal to the suspense account, this should enable you to move forward with balances that agree from now and if still not resolved by the year end just write off.

Poodle