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Is it too late in the year to set up accounting? I’m aware I can input a starting month (with current book balances) any time. Any advice, best practices?

RC_USER wrote:Is it too late in the year to set up accounting? I’m aware I can input a starting month (with current book balances) any time. Any advice, best practices?

Depends ... if your accounting year is Oct thru Sept, then have at it. However, if not, I'd wait until January to actually setup the system. In this way you'll have the end of year 2013 balances to begin 2014 with.

Finish out this year using the system you currently use so that you be able to provide a single set of reports.

If you are content to load lump sum year to date balances for your income and expense accounts and you have a clean cutoff point (as of a month end) then the only month it might really be too late to set up accounting is if you are in the last month of your FY. It won't take much time to load lump sum year to date balances for income and expenses. But if you need to load the detail transactions for the entire year so that you have the transaction history then I would follow Neil's advice.

Thank You Both.
Our books start Jan.01

I would set up with lump sum balances through September and detail accounting for the rest of 2013. This would let you make sure you have your chart of accounts set up the way you want them. It would give you time to correct any errors before the new year. I'm still finding errors after 2 years, in accounts seldom used.

Eugene

F12Mahon wrote:I would set up with lump sum balances through September and detail accounting for the rest of 2013. This would let you make sure you have your chart of accounts set up the way you want them. It would give you time to correct any errors before the new year. I'm still finding errors after 2 years, in accounts seldom used.

Eugene

Another idea would be to setup accounting on a stand-alone computer. Install PCPlus on a separate computer, and work with the accounting setup. Then you can run in parallel so you can get used to it.

Then at the end of December, print out the chart of accounts, the dependencies report, etc, and enter it on the main system. Then bring over the balances to start with the new year.

Ok, we still have not set up accounting. We ran into some unrelated issues. Ok so we must set up accounting ASAP. We want to go back to Jan 1, so just to clarify, enter book bank balance from Dec 31. 2013? Expenses start at 0 for 2014. Any other tips?

Note: we have unposted contributions for all of Jan, let us know what to do with these. should we post them first? I know we shouldn't wait to do this. We'll have it set up to go into accounting automatically.

Thank you for your time

RC_USER wrote:Ok, we still have not set up accounting. We ran into some unrelated issues. Ok so we must set up accounting ASAP. We want to go back to Jan 1, so just to clarify, enter book bank balance from Dec 31. 2013? Expenses start at 0 for 2014. Any other tips?

Note: we have unposted contributions for all of Jan, let us know what to do with these. should we post them first? I know we shouldn't wait to do this. We'll have it set up to go into accounting automatically.

Thank you for your time

Enter any unreconciled checks that were still outstanding as of Jan 1st, as these will need to be reconciled eventually. The Accounting Setup Wizard will guide you through the questions, you'll be asked for a number of items in order to start your books.

As far as unposted contributions, DO NOT post them until you have everything else set up. The Accounting Setup Wizard, this will wipe any existing entries, so do not enter anything for 2014 until you've completed your setup, and have entered your Chart of Accounts.

In addition to what Neil said, you will want to determine what the balances were in all of the designated accounts the church has as of December 31 and determine whether these should be categorized as Temporarily Restricted or Permanently Restricted. The Accounting Setup Assistant will create all of the necessary designated income and release accounts for you, along with the corresponding contribution funds and the beginning January 1 fund balances. In setting up your chart of accounts I would recommend that you obtain a copy of the church budget for 2014 and use that as a guide in setting up the accounts.

Finally we setup accounting...Thanks for your help.

We are in the process of "Entering transactions"(utilities, etc.) from beginning of year(not that many) I'm using Windows 7 Gateway and when I hit F2 to lookup account number a get the setup for my Gateway backup?? any suggestions.
Its best to reconcile each month instead of entering all transactions right?

Make sure that before you press F2 that your curser is in the account number field. Once you are in the account number field you might also need to click in the field once before pressing F2.

I would recommend entering your transactions one month at a time. Once you get all the transactions for that month entered run the bank reconciliations. Once you have everything entered and balanced for that month move on to the next month.

Thanks.

Since i'm entering transactions from Jan. do I need to backtrack and enter manual checks in Accounts Payable for the checks we have written out for utilities, etc? or am i just entering them as transactions(debits/credits) from fund accounting?

RC_USER wrote:Since i'm entering transactions from Jan. do I need to backtrack and enter manual checks in Accounts Payable for the checks we have written out for utilities, etc? or am i just entering them as transactions(debits/credits) from fund accounting?

You can do it either way.

When I started Accounting at one church I'm working at, we started in July. I started with the end of 2012 balance, and entered all the data from January forward.

I used AP and entered manual checks using the check register, this gave me a vendor history for the year. When I fully took over the bill payments, I started with a new number series of checks going forward to differentiate the old and new. The old handwritten checks stopped at 2859 or so, the new checks started at 3001.

What this did was allow me to verify what I entered against the bank statements, and get clean reconciliations.

Thanks for being so helpful!
I'm working on setting up vendors then will enter manual checks..and go from there