Cash book help

crawleygirl

Wondered if anyone could help with this? Someone who has just joined our accounts team has asked me why we have a cash book in excel when we could post payments and receipts directly to sage from cheque book, paying in book and bank statement?

I will explain what we do:

We use the Sage facility to pay suppliers each week. We then transfer this information onto the cash book.


We record bank payments (payments other than suppliers) from the bank statement onto an excel spreadsheet (cash book).
We record all bank receipts from bank statement onto excel spreadsheet (cash book)

Once we have the cashbook we then post all the transactions other than the supplier payments onto sage as supplier payment had already been posted using the sage facility at the time of making the payment.

Please could anyone help with the question above?

jenny3549

I suppose that you do it for a sort of peace of mind double checking kind of thing. But your new colleague is right - you are doubling up on your work.

I post supplier payments straight through Sage when I do them, cheque payments the same and all other DDs etc from the bank statements weekly. Although I do still keep a little manual diary which I record customer chqs in when I receive them. I post them to Sage when they are paid into the bank but I suppose that is my little back up for when I am on holidays etc then whoever opens the mail records them for me so things don't get missed off.

crispy

If you are already using the cash-book facility within sage to record/make payments/receipts and produce bank reconciliations then I would have thought keeping an excel spreadsheet would be doubling-up on work,as the spreadsheet would just contain the same information as the sage cash-book.

If you are not fully using the Sage Cash-Book facility, then you would need the spreadsheet in order to complete a bank reconciliation - your external accountants will also require print-offs of your cashbooks/reconciliations (either excel or sage) to complete the year end financials.

Primble

we have a paper cash book incase the computers break so we can still answer questions is people ring.

Rinske

We don't use sage, but our software package also allows us to work without an excel cash book. However we still use it. Our income controller posts all payments from the bank statement to excel and from there it gets posted to our software, either by the purchase ledger department or the income controller, depending on what it is. Any cheques send out will be recorded when send out and marked when cashed, so you can keep track of cheques being cashed or not. For us it is a great way to keep track of all payments and makes sure all payments are posted. We also got a separate list of all payments per bank account, which lists all payments the moment they are raised, except for the BACS run, to make sure that we know where they are for signing and it's a great way to check if a payment has been sent out and from which bank account.

I do think we do a lot double there and would like to get rid of the payment log, but I wouldn't get rid of the cash book, although I suppose it depends on how you use the cash book, but the payments in our software would not be able to track which cheques are cashed and would not match the cash book with the bank account, while the cash book in excel always gets matched at the end of the week.

We only use the cash book for our main bank accounts though, all smaller bank accounts are posted directly to the software.