Keeping in Touch
Getting the Most from Your Sage MAS 90 / 200 Investment
July 2009, Issue 20 |
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| Greetings! |
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The focus of this month's newsletter is to give you a few tips and tricks to help you gain efficiency and to help you be on the look out for problem areas in your Sage MAS 90 / 200 system.
We value your feedback on our monthly newsletters. Click here to let us know how we're doing. |
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Courses |
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Have you seen our latest course offerings. Please click here to see course offerings scheduled for July and August.
We're offering courses in
- Your Sage MAS 90 / 200 Data in Excel
- Business Insights Explorer
- Introduction to Crystal Reports
- Crystal Reports - Refresher
- Business Alerts
- F9
If you're interested in one or more of these sessions, but the dates don't work for you, click here and let us know what dates would work better for you. |
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| How to Write Off a Bad Debt |
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It's not something you want to do, of course, but sometimes, you just have to write off a bad debt in Accounts Receivable.
- Enter a $0 cash receipt for the customer; for better tracking, we suggest that the cheque number be something like "WRITE OFF" so that it is more easily identified when looking at the transaction in the future
- In the 'Lines' screen of the entry, select the invoice that needs to be written off and then enter the amount of the write off that you want to process (full or partial write off)
- In the 'Lines' screen of the entry, change the Line Type to GL Account (this field may be in the 'secondary grid'), and then select the appropriate GL account (you can enter multiple GL account lines if you need to -- posting some of the balance to 'Bad Debt Expense', 'GST on Sales', and/or 'PST on Sales', as needed).
Although there are other ways to do the Bad Debt Write Off, the above is our suggested approach. We have seen some users create a credit memo to post the write off. We usually don't suggest this because it will affect the Sales Analysis information within the AR and SO modules and normally, this is not the desired outcome.
Some users may write off a balance of an invoice to PST -- this is a discussion that you should have with your accountant and the Retail Sales Tax office about whether this is the correct treatment or not.
For more specific field by field instructions on how to write off a bad debt, search the Sage MAS 90 / 200 help screens for 'bad debt'. |
| Future Postings - Beware |
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Recently, we were working with a client to correct postings related to a future year. As we analyzed the data, it became apparent that the problem was much more widespread than we first realized.
The start of the problem was when a user posted something to a future year -- the year 2024 was used by a simple slip of the fingers when changing the posting date. Although the user corrected the problem as soon as it was discovered, the year 2024 was now established as a 'future year' in the GL. Because of the way that Sage has programmed the future year setup in the General Ledger, any transactions beyond the current fiscal year would automatically be posted to that fiscal year (the year 2024, rather than the year 2010). This problem first surfaced two years ago, but was not corrected. It surfaced again this year, and the client made the decision to get it corrected once and for all.
Corrections were made to about 15 tables in the MAS 90 / 200 system throughout all the modules -- GL, AR, IM, PO, and SO. It was a very time consuming task to identify all the tables where there were problems and determine how the problem would be corrected in each of the tables.
If you have a year set up in your General Ledger that is out of sequence, you should do an indepth analysis of your system's data. For example, if you have year 2008, 2009, 2010, and then year 2021 set up, then all postings after 2010 will automatically go to year 2021, unless you manually create the year 2011.
Many users can accept incorrect postings of analysis information in the subledger modules, but if a posting goes out of whack in the General Ledger, there are deeper issues involved.
If you discover this problem in your system and would like our help in getting it resolved, click here to send an email and we'll get the process started.
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| Feedback from Our Survey |
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In May, we sent a survey to our customers asking for feedback on their likelihood to recommend the Sage MAS 90 / 200 product line and their likelihood to recommend the services of Munjal White Consulting to a business contact. Overall, the feedback was very positive. As promised in our last newsletter, we're following up on some of the issues raised.
As well, we asked Do you have any suggestions for improving our services or our communications with you? Click here to see details of your feedback and our responses. If you provided feedback and would like to discuss a specific topic with us, click here to get the discussion started. | |
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We look forward to your feedback and your ideas for future issues of our newsletter. If you would like to contribute an article to a future newsletter, we'd love to have your contribution. Please let us know how we can help you Get the Most from Your Sage MAS 90 / 200 Investment.
Sincerely,
Shabnam and Robert |
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