Symptom: Balances appear different. It’s not possible to generate mid-month report date in Sage. Only options for the Trial Balance is to include future transactions.
Cause: Sage won’t always let you choose a specific date to run a Trial Balance report to compare with converted data. Alternatively the year-end may not have been completed in Sage.
Explanation: If a year end hasn’t been completed in Sage then after 12 months the only option when running a Trial Balance may be to select “Future” for the report date. This will mean Sage is generating balances for a period starting at the beginning of the last financial year right up past the previous year end right up to the last transaction entered. The “Future” Trial Balance figures will be for a period of more than 12 months and may include future dated transactions.
Example: A 31st March 2016 year end hasn’t been closed in Sage. If a “Convert to” date of 30th September 2016 was selected but the backup file included data for October 2016 then the Sage Trial Balance will include transactions from 1st April 2015 right up to the latest October 2016 transaction in the “Future” report. Comparing this “Future” trial balance covering 19 months with that in your new software that automatically starts from the the current year (eg. per the above example 1st April 2016 to 30th September 2016 being 6 months) will provide different results because of the different dates being used.
Even if a year end hasn’t been completed, if you choose a mid-month “Convert to” date then you won’t be able to choose a mid month Trial Balance date in Sage to use for comparison.
Fix: If the conversion was at a month end but the Sage Trial Balance only displays a “Future” option, then take a backup before running the year-end. This will then allow you to select a month end in the following year when generating a Trial Balance.
If the conversion was to a mid-month date, there arne’t any “fixes”. Assuming there aren’t any future dated transactions, the easiest solution is not to work in the desktop software after initiating the conversion. Doing so may mean having to duplicate data entry in the online system post-conversion anyway.
There isn’t any reliable solution to being able to generate reports on custom dates but it is possible in Sage to generate the balance on one nominal account by reviewing the Nominal Activity for a specified custom date range. This should at least indicate if there are transactions in Sage after the “convert to” date of your conversion.