Data Integrity or imbalances, between your control accounts and the subsidiary ledgers, can happen at any time for a number of reasons. These reasons include:
- opening or take-on balances not agreeing,
- journals posted to the control accounts, or
- incorrect setups and transactional integrations resulting in incorrect postings.
This document is designed to guide you through procedures that will help you identify the reasons for the imbalance.
Checking your Data Integrity
To verify the integrity of your data, go to the Control Panel and select the “Check Data Integrity” icon selecting the various tabs as required.
NOTE – should you have an integrity issue that prevents the year-end, it is recommended that you rectify the imbalance and post the difference to a control account that can be investigated at a later stage.
Customer and Vendor Control Account Setup
For Accounts Receivable and Accounts Payable the most important thing is to understand the Control Accounts used. In the example below, you will see the Accounts Receivable as well as the Deposits accounts highlighted.
In Palladium, we make use of 2 control accounts with the Accounts Receivable being Customers with Debit balances and Deposits being Customers with credit balances in the form of Credit Notes and Unallocated receipts. In order to reconcile the Customer aging, you would need to Net these accounts off against each other. NOTE that you can map, or setup these to the same accounts, alleviating the need to net them off. A common mistake that occurs is where clients post other entries to the deposit account, and in doing so, cause this imbalance.
The same theory applies to the Accounts Payable with the Accounts Payable and Prepayment accounts being netted off against each other.
Inventory Control Account Setup
Inventory is more technical as we set up control accounts per Account-set, meaning that each Item, or Group of Items could have their own Inventory Control Account as seen below.
Control Accounts Not Balancing
If accounts do not balance then, in essence, the General Ledger does not balance to the Subsidiary Ledger – Aging reports. If this is the case, please follow the following process.
- Create an excel spreadsheet similar to that below, recording the differences per period. Thereafter it becomes a process of elimination, halving the selected dates or periods until you can identify the date on which the transactions have gone out.
Once you have identified the day, you need to process a transaction report for the accounts and identify the errant transaction.
Article ID: 1150, Created: February 28, 2018 at 8:23 AM, Modified: February 28, 2018 at 8:25 AM