getting a clean slate

tlovegrove · Post by **tlovegrove** » Sat Oct 02, 2004 2:37 pm

We just finished our first fiscal year with PowerChurch. We learned a lot; made a lot of mistakes; and feel like we are really starting to get a handle on things (yeah for version 9). We would like to start with a "clean slate" now, instead of having all of our contorted transactions from the last year to deal with (for example, when we balnce our checkbook). What would be the best way to do this with version 9?

Thank you!

Randy B · Post by **Randy B** » Mon Oct 04, 2004 8:23 am

I am an government accountant by trade and I am not sure by what you mean by your question. Your question sounds as though you are satisfied with your revenue and expense accounts and want to close your fiscal year. If you do that then new balance sheet amounts are established and the ending balance in one fiscal year becomes the beginning balance in the new fiscal year. The only way to then to adjust your balances is through some journal entries. If you go in through the chart of accounts and adjust the the balances from the prior year, you lose an audit trail and should document what you did and why.

Matt · Post by **Matt** » Fri Oct 08, 2004 1:20 pm

Please explain what you mean by "contorted transactions". The more detail you can provide the more I may be able to help.

tlovegrove · Post by **tlovegrove** » Fri Oct 08, 2004 3:03 pm

We would enter a transaction; then figure out that we did it incorrectly; then do something else to try to reverse/fix it; then realize we did that incorrectly; etc. So there are a few times where what should have been one entry is actually 5 entries. This just makes it miserable when we try to use the reconcile feature, etc.
Maybe all of this won't matter since we are in a new fiscal year? Will everything (like the bank reconciling) "reset"?

foxygramps · Post by **foxygramps** » Sat Oct 09, 2004 3:49 am

Don't close the prior year. With ver 9 you can keep prior years open. now you can keep up tp 6 months open, and you close a month, not the year.
I think you should fix the problems in the prior year, then the corrections should come forward.

Matt · Post by **Matt** » Sat Oct 09, 2004 10:40 am

Ok. I think I understand where you are coming from. Let me ask you this. Are your bank reconciliations in balance now? If they are not, you will need to go through the work (I know it won't be fun) to get them back into balance. Once the bank recons are in balance, when you go to run them again make sure you select the "unreconciled transactions" button. That way you won't see all of your past errors when doing the reconciliation (since these should all be reconciled by now).

From an accounting and auditing point of view, it is important to keep a complete history of all transactions in the system. When errors are made and then subsequently corrected, it is important that the accounting records show that this happened. PC+ does a superb job of this and the software is very good in that you can't delete a transaction once it has posted to the system.

If multiple corrections have to be made to the same transaction it can get complicated to sort it all out, as you state. However, it is better that the accounting records show a complete history of what happened.

Zoe · Post by **Zoe** » Mon Oct 11, 2004 9:31 am

now you can keep up tp 6 months open,

You can actually have up to 12 months open at a time.