Sage Help Required
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Muncher

Original Poster:

12,235 posts

272 months

Thursday 20th October 2005
quotequote all
I'm using Sage Instant Accounts for the first time to do my accounts and it is a real pain in the rear.

Essentially I entered an invoice in error. I deleted it from the invoices menu but it still appears in the financials menu, I have searched high and low for a way to get rid of it to no avail.

How do you delete something like that which you have done in error?

clarkey

1,412 posts

307 months

Thursday 20th October 2005
quotequote all
The only way should be to enter a credit note.

davidy

4,492 posts

307 months

Thursday 20th October 2005
quotequote all
Yes raise a credit note.

I find Sage a pain in the *rs*, it is very inflexible but it really does force you into understanding double-entry book-keeping.

Personally I prefer the approach taken by Quickbooks (which allows simple edits), but you can cheat 'the system' which can take a long time to track down. Accountants generally prefer Sage because of this.

I've used both and have gone back to Quickbooks as I can enter and manage stuff a lot faster, which is a great saving on my time.

One of the best things I ever did when I first started my own business was go to an Accountancy evening class, it really hammered home double entry book keeping, once you understand that it all becomes clear.

davidy

Smartie

2,622 posts

296 months

Thursday 20th October 2005
quotequote all
file
maintenance

find the entry

delete!

Muncher

Original Poster:

12,235 posts

272 months

Thursday 20th October 2005
quotequote all
Smartie said:
file
maintenance

find the entry

delete!



Yes, I found that minutes after I made my post. You would have thought they could have made that a bit more obvious!

Eric Mc

124,764 posts

288 months

Thursday 20th October 2005
quotequote all
Sage is great - if you are an accountant.

Muncher

Original Poster:

12,235 posts

272 months

Thursday 20th October 2005
quotequote all
Eric Mc said:
Sage is great - if you are an accountant.


Yeah I kind of figured that.

I'm only just working out how to do the basics, I think I'll be asking a few more questions at some point!

Eric Mc

124,764 posts

288 months

Thursday 20th October 2005
quotequote all
I've used various versions of Sage since 1988 - and I still find bits of it confusing.

Smartie

2,622 posts

296 months

Thursday 20th October 2005
quotequote all
well dont upgrade to v12 unless you havr to - very fiddly!

Muncher

Original Poster:

12,235 posts

272 months

Thursday 20th October 2005
quotequote all
I have version 10.

Smartie

2,622 posts

296 months

Friday 21st October 2005
quotequote all
i'm using line 50 rather than instant accounts, not sure if upgrades run together.

Uriel

3,244 posts

274 months

Thursday 24th November 2005
quotequote all
I'll probably get sacked for this if anyone from work finds it, but it anyone needs any Sage advice, feel free to drop me a line. I spent 4 years supporting the Sage Accounts products and am now in data repair fixing all those pesky errors

Eric Mc

124,764 posts

288 months

Thursday 24th November 2005
quotequote all
I might be making use of that offer some day

Uriel

3,244 posts

274 months

Thursday 24th November 2005
quotequote all
By all means. I've gotten so much help from PH with my cars over the years, it'd be nice to give something back where I am able.

Jaglover

45,903 posts

258 months

Friday 25th November 2005
quotequote all
Eric Mc said:
Sage is great - if you are an accountant.


Yep

It's my favourite package for the clients to use.

smartie

2,622 posts

296 months

Friday 25th November 2005
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its very good for getting info out of later, Quicken etc may be easier to use but nowhere near as powerful when you want to interogate it!

golfman

5,628 posts

269 months

Friday 25th November 2005
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I use Line 50 FC to basically run our company.

My grievance is mainly with stock control. We manufacture stuff, so nothing is ever a nice “completed” product on the shelf ready to go therefore stock is always wrong, which is a massive pain in the arse. BOM is also grief so don’t mention it.

Anyway does anyone know how to delete product codes or customers etc that I don’t want to keep any longer without having to clear all the past years financial activity!

Uriel you now work for me, or I will grass you up!

Uriel

3,244 posts

274 months

Friday 25th November 2005
quotequote all
golfman said:
Anyway does anyone know how to delete product codes or customers etc that I don’t want to keep any longer without having to clear all the past years financial activity!

Uriel you now work for me, or I will grass you up!


There really is no quick or easy way to delete records with associated activity.

With stock you can run the stock transaction CSV report (use the extended one) with the output set to file rather than printer. Save it as a CSV file. Then use Rebuild from File Maintenance to remove all stock transactions. Once done, you can delete the records you don't want. Then open the CSV file in Excel or whatever and delete every line that relates to the deleted products. Then save the file and use File/Import to import the CSV file. This will then bring back the transactions for the remaining records. A right fanny on.

For customers/suppliers/nominal records it's the same thing, but even more of a pain. Because of limitations in the CSV structure you can't export sales receipts, purchase payments or discounts. The problem is that were you to import a sales receipt, say, the program has no idea what to allocate it against. So only transactions that can sit as outstanding can be imported. There is a filter on the Audit Transaction CSV report to stop these being exported. The only way to get around it is to edit the report in Report Designer, remove the filter and then run it to CSV. Rebuild the transactions and delete the records. Then delete the unwanted transactions from the CSV file. But because of this receipt/payment malarky you have to go through the CSV file using find/replace to replace SR/PP/SD/PD with SA/PA/SC/PC respectively. You can then import this which will bring all your transactions back into the program, but every receipt/payment will now be an outstanding payment on account, all invoices will be outstanding and all discounts will be outstanding credit notes. You have to then manually reallocate the whole shebang. I've only ever known a couple of people to ever bother with it.

The most common way around it is to change the name of the accounts to NOT IN USE or something and apply a search to not show accounts with that name.

Of course, make sure you have decent back ups before going anywhere near the rebuild option.

[public service announcement]In fact, just make sure you have lots of decent back ups all the time. Don't take them without running Check Data from File Maintenance first and if you get any errors at all (warnings and comments are ok) stop what you're doing and call Sage or contact me. If you do find errors whatever you do, DO NOT click fix. We've been asking for it to be taken out of the program forever. There are very few errors it can successfully fix and the ones it can't it tends to make a lot worse. On the Data Repair Team we can Fix most forms of corruption, but chances are, if we get your data in after you've run it through the Fix routine you'll get it back in a worse state than if you'd not run Fix.

Sorry if I come off preachy or condescending, but several times a week I come across customers that have no back ups or have perfectly archived back ups going back years, all with the same corruption on them because they haven't ran check data and reaslised that there was a problem until the program starts falling over. It's not fun explaining to someone that their data is to too far gone for us to do anything with when they have no back ups, have lost 5 years worth of accounts and have to start again from scratch.[/public service announcment]