Sage Year End Procedure

Running a year end on Sage Instant or Line 50 is something which you will probably not do often enough to remember the order of events. Let Holland & Co help you:

Remember, all the staff at Holland & Co are fully trained on sage products, Mark French works on the sage payroll on a regular basis and his payroll work can be covered by Stephen Gill, Chris Nanson, Chris Hands and Ian Lowe when Mark is off work.

All Holland & Co staff use Sage Instant and Line 50 on a daily basis and so please contact us if you have any queries relating to sage. The year end procedure which Holland & Co recommend you adopt is as follows:

  1. Post all transactions for the year onto Sage. It will probably be some time after your year end before you are confident that all such transactions have been captured. Is is preferable not to post any transactions dated after the year end onto Sage, although it is not disastrous if you do.

  2. Check that Sage is set up with your correct year end date: Settings > Financial Year. Ironically, this field is set to the year start month, rather than the year end month. Care will be needed when your period of account is not exactly 12 months.

  3. Change your program date to your year end date: Settings > Change Program Date.

  4. Reconcile all bank and cash accounts up to the year end date.

  5. Reconcile the VAT account up to the period end for which the last VAT return has been prepared.

  6. Make sure that all nominal accounts are included in the Profit & Loss Account or Balance Sheet, by checking entries in: Nominal > COA > Edit > Check.

  7. Make sure that a sensible number of back-ups have been made, check that they exist where you think and that they can be restored without corruption. We recommend that these back-up files are not given the default Sage name. Also print out a sensible amount of hard copy reports (at least including a year to date trial balance).

  8. Run the year end procedure via: Tools > Period End > Year End (checking that the disclosed Year End Journals date is your correct year end). This procedure can also be used to copy the detail from the year just ended as a basis for creating budgets for the new year and for archiving this data (for later versions of Line 50) for future (read only) interrogation.

  9. If you wish to compress your data, by removing the detail of all of the transactions for the year just ended, run: Tools > Period End > Clear Audit Trail (checking that the disclosed date is your year end). If performance and hard drive space are not compromised, you may wish to ignore this step, to preserve the amount of historical data which can easily be interrogated on Sage.

  10. Now is an ideal opportunity for Sage housekeeping, such as removing old accounts and restructuring the nominal ledger.

  11. Before posting new transactions, make sure that the brought forward position is as expected.

We offer full on-site and remote Sage consulting support services, to help you with your year end. We are available for one-off problem solving or assisting you with ongoing maintenance.

Unlike the support provided by Sage directly, we can advise, both, on your specific accounting problems, as well as you software usage problems. In addition, we only bill for the actual time spent helping you, unlike Sage, who charge a fixed annual fee in advance. We can therefore advance you up the Sage learning-curve, so that you get the most from this software.

Practical Examples of our Sage Year End Expertise

  • 'Talking you through' a Sage year end over the phone.
  • Receiving your Sage back-up data as an e-mailed attachment which we then run a year end on, before e-mailing it back to you.
  • Outsourcing your Sage accounts function, providing you with an 'interrogation only' version of the data, so that you do not need support.
  • Providing you with opening balance adjustments, for entry onto Sage, once we have prepared your accounts, to synchronise the statutory accounts closing position with the management accounts opening position.