What to do to prepare for the year-end processing.

Speak to your Accountant 
Talk to your accountant about what reports they want and what they expect. Your accountant will charge you to prepare and finalise your financial figures and as such the more efficient you are and the easier you make it for your accountant, the less you will have to pay for his / her services. (Well that’s how it should be anyway).  

Your accountant will require certain reports such as balance sheets etc. Some accountants vary in the reports they expect and a discussion with them prior to ending your year may save you a lot of time and grief at a later stage. Your accountant should also be made aware of your chart of accounts in advance to ensure they are aware of what each account represents and where they need to place it on their system. Not all accountants would understand your terminology for what you call an account.  

Version 7.5 users can print their reports out in PDF format and save them to CDRom - preferably not re-writable. [Don't forget to make a copy - one for the accountant and one for you]. The CD should be carefully marked EOY reports 2007.  By storing them in PDF format on the CDRom your accountant will be able to view the reports on his computer and you will be smug in the knowledge that you have been very professional, saved yourself hours of printing and have saved a heap of trees.

Backing up your data 
It is the responsibility of the user to ensure that you keep adequate backups of your software to avoid any data loss due to corruption, power failures, processing errors or any other event, which may cause the loss of data. Do 2 (two) or more backups of your data just prior to processing the year end and ensure that these backups are done correctly and stored in a safe place e.g. keep one at the office and one at home.  
 
Un-finalised Jobs 
Before processing your year end, you may wish to ensure that all of your work in progress has been finalised, [or at least as much as possible is finalised] to ensure your customers receive their bill and you get paid quicker. However, if you are in a position where you expect to make a good profit  for the year then you may wish to extend the unfinished jobs into the next tax period. This will reduce your tax liability for the current financial year. However it will catch up with you next year. (Again we don’t recommend this procedure.)  

Printing a report  To get a list of all un-finalised jobs go to Reports > then workshop > then Jobs in progress. 

 
Enter a date range in which to look for the un-finalised jobs e.g. 01/07/06 to 30/06/07. You also have the option to put in your sales person’s initials & print it off person by person, (if you use this facility) 

 
The report will provide you with a list of all un-finalised jobs awaiting input from you.  Either they are jobs in progress not finished which you will carry into the new year, or jobs that have been forgotten about which you will need to finalise or jobs that were never started, which you will need to delete. 

 
Un-finalised orders  
Before processing your year end, you may wish to ensure that all of your orders in progress have been finalised, [or at least as much as possible is finalised] to ensure that you can claim all valid expenses in the current financial year and as such reduce your tax liability. This will also ensure the maximum input credits for your GST. 

Reviewing purchase orders
Select purchase orders then > review orders.

Instead of selecting a supplier code click onto the small gray box next to the Order No section. A locater box will come up with all your outstanding purchase orders. Select the one that you want to review.

 
 
Go through them all one by one by using the review process above, so you can either Delete, Finalise or leave them if you are still waiting for goods. These will be carried over into the next financial year  
 
Bank Reconciliation.  
You should have been performing regular and accurate bank reconciliations and so reconciling prior to the end of the year should be the same simple process.  If you have not, you have a tedious process to go through to ensure that your bank account statements match the entries that have been processed through the computer. 

Do not to forget to process Bank charges, Loan Payments, Lease payments or any other direct debit or other automatic payment that goes into or comes out of your bank account. As these only show on your Bank statement each month and you do not get a remittance posted to you each month to remind you they can easily be forgotten. 

Stock-take
Prior to processing the end of the year you may wish to perform a stock take and update your stock records with the current on hand values

Reconciling your Ledger control accounts to your aged analysis.  
Check that your 2020 account matches your creditors list from your trial balance and your debtors aged analysis. You can match the total on the analysis report to the 1030 account on your trial balance. These figures should be the same. 

In the event that they are not, you have a few options. The best option is to track down the event/transaction that cause the out of balance to occur. 

The first step in doing this is to go into AM-Win and select the Check Tran Master file option from the Others menu. 

Select the customer option and click on the Process button. This will provide a list of any customers, which do not balance against the transactions for that customer

You can then print this list and investigate each entry. You should also do the same process for Supplier and Ledger to check any other out of balance entries.  

4. The next step is to print the Transaction-Audit report under the reports > accounting menu within AM-Win

This will display a list of any out of balance transactions that have occurred.

In the event that you are unable to find the discrepancy after many hours of searching then you may wish to process a journal against the control account (3020) to rectify this problem (we highly advise AGAINST this unless its simply a last resort). Now it depends on which way the journal entries go either debit or credit by how much the debtor & creditor accounts are out by> (Up or Down/ minus or positive) Please note this screen is an example only; do not follow for your entries.

If you are unable to journal against these accounts then you must set-up the Ledger Masks under the tools menu within AM-Win to provide you access to  these accounts.

You should also check that your 1040 (all stock held) account matches your stock average cost on the stock valuation report. The stock valuation report will give you qty x ave ex cost, for grand total ave cost value of stock. To do this Go to reports > stock> valuation report to get this figure. You'll find it at the bottom of the last page. 

In most cases due to negative stock, incorrect stocktaking, resetting of average costs etc these figures will not balance. In the event that they do not balance you should attempt to investigate why. However, in most cases this will be a very long and fruitless exercise. 

If you have given up on this then transfer the out of balance amount from your 1040 or appropriate stock account to your 7020 cost of sales account where it should have gone in the first place. (Using your General ledger journal screen). 

Check that your income statement YTD figure equals your un-appropriated profit figure on the balance sheet. (It comes under “Income & Expense”) These two figures should be the same. If this is not the case then you may have some corrupt or unbalanced entries.  If this is the case contact your distributor for further help, Data can be lost due to corruption, power failures, processing errors, hardware lockups, virus attacks or any other event. Your distributor will try to help your fix the problem but it is not guaranteed due to some of the instances above.