Many of our clients use Sage 50 Accounts to maintain their accounting records. Sage has been around for a long time and has added a lot of features over the years, which may not be familiar to many users.

At a recent seminar presented by CentrePoint Software, which was hosted by Barnes Roffe, many of these useful but less well known features were highlighted…

Favourite reports

Sage comes with a very large number of reports and it can often be difficult to locate the one you need. To make this easier, each report on the list now has a star next to it which can be selected to add the report to your favourites. Favourite reports appear in a separate category and can also be selected from the main menu bar.

Monthly profit and loss breakdown

This is a less well known but very useful report which produces a full monthly profit and loss account for the current year, with each month in a separate column. It can be found within Financial Reports > Management analysis > Standard budgeting > Profit and Loss (Monthly Breakdown). Every figure in this report can be drilled down to the individual transaction level.

Beware that reversing journals may be necessary here to make monthly stock adjustments (see next point).

Reversing journals

It is possible to set up journal entries to automatically reverse at a specific date – e.g., to post month end stock adjustments or accruals which are reversed on the first day of the next month.

In order to do this you need to enable reversing journals (under Settings > Company Preferences > Parameters > tick “Enable reversing journals”.

Once done, when entering journals there will now be a tickbox underneath to make the reversing entry, along with the date at which the reversing entry will be posted. When you post the original journal, the reversing journal is immediately posted along with it.

Journal recall

Also part of the journal entry screen is the facility to recall commonly used journals – e.g., for posting monthly wages, depreciation, bank charges etc.

After entering a journal, click “Memorise” to add it to the list of these journals, or “Recall” to bring in an already memorised journal from this list. The journal can be edited before being posted, so this is particularly useful where the posting is the same but the amounts might vary from month to month, such as with wages journals.

Invoice copying

In a similar way to recalling journals, sales invoices raised through Sage can be copied to be used as a template for creating a new invoice to speed up the process. This can be done from the invoice list within Customers – simply select the invoice to copy and select Duplicate from below the list. All details of the new invoice can be customised.

Similarly from the invoice list you can quickly raise a credit against an invoice by selecting the invoice and selecting Credit from below the list.

Preventing back posting

In the normal course of events there is nothing to prevent the back posting of transactions into prior periods (either years or management accounts reporting periods), which can be problematic.

Sage allows you to prevent this – go to Settings > Lock Date and select a specific date before which posting is to be prohibited. Note that this can be any date, not just the year end, so it may be useful in managing monthly closedowns, etc.

If you wish to prevent specific Sage users from overriding this control, their Sage logon must have “Lock Dates” access disabled.
Barnes Roffe is working closely with a key and leading Sage training partner, CentrePoint Software, and would be pleased to put any of our clients who are interested in improving their knowledge of Sage in contact with them.