We have just completed our first financial year on this Solar Accounts system and am now ready to start the next year.
We now feel that in this first year we split our income into too much detail and therefore consider that several of the accounts are now uneccessary. An example of this follows: - Sales of CDs for 1841 census, 1851 census, 1861 census etc we now wish to have one account for census CDs.
Am I correct in thinking that if I just continue making entries for the new year I will not be able to delete the numerous uneccessary accounts and therefore I shall just have to start fresh with a New Business File, enter the accounts I need and then transfer the amalgumated balances ?

Hi Jeanette,

Yes it's not easy to 'merge' accounts in Solar Accounts. One thing to keep in mind: when you have entered all your transactions for the financial year, you should click menu Setup > Financial Year > Start a new financial year. This will transfer the balance from all the income and expense accounts to Retained Earnings (ie. resetting the income and expense balancesto zero)

The simplest approach is to create a new account called 'Sales of CDs' and add 'ZZZ' to the front of the old account names to ensure they are grouped at the end of the account drop-lists. (You don't have to 'amalgamate the balances' because all income accounts are set to zero when you follow the new financial year procedure described above)

If you prefer to create a new data file, you will need to enter the opening balances for assets, liabilities and equity from the old file (note that income and expenses will be 'reset' to zero as described above so you won't need to transfer these balances). Two things to note about this approach:
1. If you have any outstanding invoices at the end of the financial year, you should copy these to the new file rather than directly setting the opening balance of the 'Accounts Receivable' or 'Accounts Payable' accounts. The account used by the opening balance invoices should be 'Retained Earnings'.
2. If you are registered for VAT and the end of a VAT period does not coincide with the end of your financial year, please let me know and I will explain how to treat the VAT balance.

I hope this makes sense - please let me know if you need more information.

Cheers,

Hi Mark,

Yes, I would also be interested to know how we also handle disjointed VAT return period with account year end. Our VAT accounts are due on Dec, Mar,Jun,Sep however our Year end is Oct. Its a real pain, to the extent that we have even contemplated changing our filing date back to start of October if we can.

Thanks
Joe.

Hi Joe,

The simplest way to handle this is to start the financial year one year earlier. So in your case, set the initial start date to 1 November 2008. Then enter all the transactions for October 2009, then click menu Setup > Financial Year > Start a new financial year (with a start date of 1 November 2009). This will leave your income and expense account balances at zero, but still pick up October transactions when calculating your VAT return.

Regards,