Hi LaChapa

For Link accounts, it has to do with Sub ledger and General ledger, Where Sub ledger is the invoice or payroll records, and General ledger is chart of account value.

So for example, the amount of outstanding Sales invoice need equals to Account Receivables's chart of account value, otherwise, we have data inconsistency in Maintenance on Integrity Summary Window or between reports.

For Accounts that you do not see in Chart of Account list, they do not exist in the program; so you have to either create a brand new one or use alternative substitute accounts

For the Vacation payable account, it is most likely link in Setup, Settings, Company, Payroll, Link account; if not you can find it follow Knowledge Base Article 10339

Hope this helps

for the vacation payable the accountant just gave me this answer:

"I don’t have much experience with linked accounts, but it looks like you would need to adjust each employee’s records in Simply to the balance in the vacation tracker as at April 30, 2015.

I was able to find this support article where another Sage user had issues with the vacation accrual adjustment: http://sagecity.na.sage.com/support_communities/sage_50_accounting_ca/f/149/t/61452 "

 

This is the table he used to come up with the JE#8 (Debit 2170 for $20877.99) and (Credit 5412 for $20877.99):

Employe		Balance Cary FWD (Hours)
1		68.44
2		35.27
3		21.71
4		8.02
5		21.05
6		197.28
7		43.22
8		79.61
9		29.9
10		0
11		61.21
12		47.31
13		0.07
14		7.28
15		-23.84
16		36.17
17		1.01
Total Hours		633.71

From what I understand in this article, I have to go to each Employee and adjust their Vacation Payable by adding or subtracting the numbers I have here but it seems that I have to do that on their next paycheque which will not work for YE as it has to be posted as of March 31, 2015.  Am I missing something?

Thanks,

La Chapa

for the vacation payable the accountant just gave me this answer:

"I don’t have much experience with linked accounts, but it looks like you would need to adjust each employee’s records in Simply to the balance in the vacation tracker as at April 30, 2015.

I was able to find this support article where another Sage user had issues with the vacation accrual adjustment: http://sagecity.na.sage.com/support_communities/sage_50_accounting_ca/f/149/t/61452 "

 

This is the table he used to come up with the JE#8 (Debit 2170 for $20877.99) and (Credit 5412 for $20877.99):

Employe		Balance Cary FWD (Hours)
1		68.44
2		35.27
3		21.71
4		8.02
5		21.05
6		197.28
7		43.22
8		79.61
9		29.9
10		0
11		61.21
12		47.31
13		0.07
14		7.28
15		-23.84
16		36.17
17		1.01
Total Hours		633.71

From what I understand in this article, I have to go to each Employee and adjust their Vacation Payable by adding or subtracting the numbers I have here but it seems that I have to do that on their next paycheque which will not work for YE as it has to be posted as of March 31, 2015.  Am I missing something?

Thanks,

La Chapa

In general our firm does not post reclassifying entries, because they can be quite problematic. It often has to do with how the accountant wants to classify expenses they are reporting in the current year. As long as your trial balance agrees with taking the reclass entries into consideration, you don't necessarily need to worry about these entries.

If you want to proceed however, go ahead with unlinking as mentioned in other answers. Your understanding regarding vacation payable is correct, you would need to post the amounts to each employee in order to correct the vacation payable total without causing a data discrepancy. However in this case it appears the accountant is just trying to record the current year's vacation payable as a current year expense; if you are going to post the reclassification I would recommend unlinking the accounts, posting the adjustment and then posting a reversing entry on the first day of the new physical year to restore the vacation payable to the correct amount. Just posting that Year end entry will essentially take away the vacation payable to your employees without actually paying it out to them.

I am so confused :( I have never done any of this so linking and unlinking and reversing entries afterwards is like chinese to me. Also, my boss used the numbers (hours) given by the accountant and calculated it and guess what it does not match, she cannot come up to the same total dollar value when she uses the hours he used so this is really starting to make me panick as the girl that helped us last year refused to do any adjustments to vacation and just dumped the amount in an account to make it balance (so i cannot just follow what she did) and she is not picking up our calls this year so we have no help what so ever to do it.

these hours times their rate does not come up to the amount of dollars he wants us to adjust so I do not understand what I have to do here.

If you go to Maintenance on the menu bar and then select Check Data Integrity, does the Vac. Pay Balance agree with the Vac. Pay Owed? If not there is probably a larger problem related to that entry from last year. If they are in agreement, keep in mind that vacation would have been earned based on their rate of pay at each paycheque, so if there have been wage increases it would explain why the current wage multiplied by hours does not equal the actual amount.

The main thing to remember is that the vacation shown as owing to your employees is their money and cannot be 'unearned'. So if you clear it out for year end, you will need to reverse the entries immediately in the next fiscal year or you have removed their vacation pay to which they are entitled. For that reason I would not attempt to adjust these one by one but rather post one lump sum journal entry if you are going to record this. Since your accountant has said they are not strictly necessary from a bookkeeping standpoint I would take that as permission to leave them unposted.

However if you want to make the entry, what you would need to do is go to Setup --> Setttings --> Payroll --> Linked Accounts --> Incomes and delete the account displayed in the field for Vacation Owed, just leave it blank and hit OK. You will need to be in single use sysadmin mode to make these changes. Once you have unlinked the Vacation Payable you can post YE ADJ 8 to debit the payable account and credit the expense account so your balances are in agreement with the accountant's for year end. Then post the reverse of this entry (CREDIT 2170 and DEBIT 5412) in the same amount on the first day of the new fiscal year to restore the actual vacation payable to the correct value. Then go back into setup and re-add the account 2170 in the Vacation Owed field to relink the vacation payable account to your payroll module so that accruals continue to be recorded to the correct account and your data stays intact.

I will keep you guys response, I'm sure they will help.

The reason we are making those entries are that for some reason, Simply is not calculating the Vacation the same way as we are. It is never up to date on our paycheck so at the end of each year, we need to make some adjusting entries to show the actual numbers. From what I was told, it used to be fine until the day they changed the year end to March 31. Since then, Simply has been wrong . We have a spread sheet where we keep our calculations (which was created by my boss and is full of formulas... I do not touch it and I do not know if its calculating correctly and I keep far away from payroll for that exact reason ... not being responsible if she messed up the calculations).

From what my boss told me that is the reason we are doing vacation payable entries each year. The girl that used to do payroll and those entries they let her go and put me in charge (except of payroll my boss took it over). They said someone would come in to help for those year end entries which only happened once. Now im on my own and I am kind of scared to mess it up. I do not want my boss to try as she understands way less than me.

Be very careful if you are altering an employee's vacation pay from what is reported on their pay stub. That could potentially cause you substantial problems in an audit, especially if you can't explain the reason for the difference, and the penalties could be really substantial.
I would recommend reviewing the Employment Standards for your province, in BC employees are entitled to 2 weeks = 4% of all earnings whether regular income, overtime, bonus, or what have you. You can check the configuration by going to Setup --> Settings --> Payroll --> Incomes which will display a grid of all the income types you have in use. Every field should be checked for calculating vacation except for Loans, Benefits, and Vacation Earned. If these fields are configured correctly and the vacation pay accrual rate is correct, there should be no reason the Sage calculation is not accurate.
It may be an idea to review this further with the accountant as errors in employee earnings are taken very seriously by CRA.