Hi there,

After the unfortunate death of our long-standing accountant who helped with bookkeeping I am having to do all the Sage bookkeeping myself now as our new accountants do not offer this service, and therefore cannot help with bookkeeping questions. We also can not find somebody able to use our older version of Sage 50 to take over the end of year tiding up as our former accountant did for us. This isn’t overly a problem until dealing with some minor loose ends left by the previous accountant I need advice on, as I have never had to deal with them myself before as he took care of it all and would simply send me the updated Sage file with all the work done.

The problem is with an accrual he set up for provisioning accountancy fees as apparently this is a bill always paid in arrears. I do not understand how accruals work on Sage or impact the balances on Sage. I simply would process the Invoice and subsequent payment for the yearly accountancy fees as any other Invoice/ bank payment through BANK-SUPPLIERS route. Because the previous accountant was running this ‘accrual’ unbeknown to me when he tidied up the accounts I do not know myself what to do with it or how it is supposed to link or reflect to the actual transaction I make in relation to accountancy fees. I am aware I may not be even making sense to people reading this who DO understand accruals as maybe I’ve got the wrong end of the stick of how they work/reflect on the accounts??

All I know is we use Sage line 50 desktop version which is over 10 years old. It does not manually process accruals. Therefore I need to know exactly what I’m supposed to be doing with this accrual posting yearly OR ideally how to just get it off the system all together so I can just process the yearly accountants fees invoice manually as I have been in SUPPLIERS INVOICES. It is a very small company I run and is not going to impact the yearly accounts audit by not using accruals. 

I know I need to do something with it as it’s just sitting ‘stuck’ outstanding in accruals nominal since the former accountant posted it and then sadly died. If anyone can advise I really appreciate instructions or explanations in very very basic non accounting language as my knowledge is extremely limited to just very basic bookkeeping. 

thank you in advance! Sarah