To Extend your Financial Year

(Accountant Plus and Financial Controller only)

Sage Line 50 will only allow a 12 month financial year. However, you can use the Financial Year option to set two financial years, one to represent the first six months of trading and one for the remaining twelve months. You can then transfer the necessary information from one to the other using journals.

For example, your first financial year runs from January 2002 to June 2003, which covers an 18-month period. Your subsequent financial year runs from July 2003 to June 2004 and so forth. When you installed Sage Line 50 you set the financial year start to January 2002 which means it will only run for 12 months up to the end of December 2002.

Using the above example you would have to change the financial start date to July 2002, therefore ending in June 2003. This means your current financial year runs for 12 months from July 2002 to June 2003.

After you have run the financial year change option, you will find a brought forward value appearing on any nominal accounts that have transactions which are dated before the start of the new financial year, i.e. these will be any nominal accounts that have transactions dated before July 2002. By default their values will not appear on any Profit and Loss report and they will not appear in the period column of your balance sheet. However, the year to date column of your balance sheet will show these figures. Any profit and loss nominal codes with a Bfwd value appear as a previous year adjustment on your balance sheet.

If you want these brought forward values to appear on your profit and loss report (to give you an accurate account of your financial position), you need to process a series of journal entries. Transfer the Brought Forward values into the first month of the newly set up financial year. For example, move the brought forward figures into July 2002, the first month of the financial year. To do this you must:

1. Remove the brought forward figures from your nominal accounts.

2. Record these balances in the first month of your new financial year

See the 'Your next step...' topic below for information on how to do this.

Your next step...

To Transfer the Brought Forward Values from your Nominal Accounts