LaChapa said:

Can I work in all 3 years at the same time or do I have to open 2 companies (so I can work in the current year while I enter my past 2years)

You can have up to two years open at once - the current, and the most recent prior year. 

i.e. if you need to work on 2014, 2015, and 2016 year ends you have to finish completely with 2014 before you can 'open' 2016, since that will permanently 'close' 2014.

The reason I am asking is that i will not have time to enter all 2014 before the end of April but I should have time to enter 2015 (i kind of have no choice anyway as its for income tax purposes). At the same time I need to be able to create an invoice March 1st and April 1st 2016 (the program i am currently using is due for renewal in a few days and I do not want to renew I want to start using sage 50). Since you mentioned that in order to open 2016 i need to close 2014 then how do I do this?
Can I create a company with the start date of Jan 01, 2014 (enter all my revenue for that year which will not take too long but not the expenses yet), Open a new year (2015) and enter ALL my 2015 expenses and revenue (so I can do my income taxes) and then go back in 2014 when I have time and enter the expenses? I believe I can do that if 2014 is not yet closed????
If such a thing is doable, then I was thinking of CREATING another "temporary" company which would be to work in 2016, only for the purpose of creating the required invoices (march 1 and april 1st) while i finish entering 2014 and 2015. Once i'm up to date in the original company and ready to close 2014 and 2015 I would open 2016 and copy the Invoices I had created in the "temporary" company and DELETE the "temporary" company... I would then be practically up to date, id only have to ensure that there is no discrepency and I could enter all 2016 expenses etc.

Do you see any flaw in the way i'm thinking or do you have a better idea? Sorry for my questions but my only experience with sage is with a company that is already setup and working good... i never had to setup anything and i dont want to mess things up. since i only started the company in 2014 i want all my years to be in sage... the business is small so it would only take me a little work to enter all the past years.

LaChapa said:

Can I create a company with the start date of Jan 01, 2014 (enter all my revenue for that year which will not take too long but not the expenses yet), Open a new year (2015) and enter ALL my 2015 expenses and revenue (so I can do my income taxes) and then go back in 2014 when I have time and enter the expenses? I believe I can do that if 2014 is not yet closed????

Yes, that will work.  You will have to be extra careful about which date you are entering, especially when later entering the previous year.

You won't be able to set the 'Session Date' to the previous year, and you will see warnings that your entries will affect reports, but just click them away and carry on.

Sage 50 allows most types of transactions that can be 'automatically adjusted', to be adjusted from one fiscal year to the next, so if you do make a mistake, it isn't the end of the world.

LaChapa said:

I would open 2016 and copy the Invoices I had created in the "temporary" company and DELETE the "temporary" company... I would then be practically up to date, id only have to ensure that there is no discrepency and I could enter all 2016 expenses etc.

Yes, that will also work.   I would never delete the 'temporary' company, but instead make backups and keep them (marked 'temporary'  If you receive a payment that doesn't match an invoice from the 'temporary' company, you will want to be able to check what went wrong.

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Also, while there is really no easy way to copy batches of transactions from one 'company file' to another, to set up a temporary company it should save time to export each 'list' (Sage calls it a Ledger) from the 'real' books, then import each one to your 'temporary' company.   (accounts, customers, inventory and service items, etc.

thank you so much,
now my biggest stress is to ensure my accounts are setup properly. Since its a sole proprietor (personal small business) and we are only just starting, (no business credit card company etc.) there are a lot of purchases done from my personal bank account (which I can charge to the company as an expense so no worries there) but there were also times that we had to put money back in the business bank account after taking it out (i know this complicates things) I therefore need to setup some kind of account to track down all the ins and outs (I assume its something like owners contribution...) I KNOW business and personal HAVE to be separate but when your small business is SMALL it means that you might have to dig in the business at times (would it be called a loan?). I never had to really worry about that as my other accounting program only tracked my income and expenses NOTHING ELSE, but obviously Sage needs to track down the ins and out which makes sense (this way i can tell my husband to stop using the business account when he runs out of money). but this does not fix the past 2 years its a mess!!!!! I need help. I also need to know how to enter all the transactions that were personal (is that called loan)???

create a bank account called something like 'Personal Bank - Owner'
you can also set it up as a liability account
but there are transactions in sage that can reference a bank but not a liability

under setup, settings, company, credit cards, used
create a card called 'C/C - Owner', payable acct = personal bank

when you record payment for a purchase, 'pay by c/c - Owner'

to pay back the owner, use pay credit card bill

a non-zero bank balance means either the owner or the business is owed money