Fixing a suddenly appearing negative cheque balance from 2018 (we are now in FY21)

Dianita

Good morning all,

I wonder if anyone has ever experienced this sudden appearance of a negative open balance for a payable related cheque payment in Reckon Accounts Enterprise 2020? I have a couple of snapshots below. The account balance is for that cheque and also an open December bill in the account.

This cheque is not a bill-payment cheque, but was a manually raised one coded to an expense account which was recently made inactive.

Is there a fix for this? The negative $2037.19 just suddenly appeared one morning out of the blue. Nothing else related to the recently made inactive expense account seems to be affected the same way (and it should not have either from previous experience)

Any help at all to try to fix this issue is appreciated. Thank you.

Regards,

Nita

Dianita

How do I amend the original message above? I need to edit something. There is no edit button anywhere. Did that just disappear after 1 hour? There is also no button to delete either if you want to start fresh??

Kris_Williams

You can only edit for up to an hour. I would copy the original message and then paste and edit. Regarding your problem, have you recently done a verify data and rebuild? Is the bank reconciliation showing this amount? It may just need to be reticked in the reconciliation!

Dianita

Hello Kris,

Thank you for your reply.

We have not performed 'verify data and rebuild' recently or ever (according to my manager), so that would not be the one contributing this issue.

The answer to the second question, I just checked the reconciliation page that our team normally does every morning, there is no indication that the amount is showing there.

Is there anything else you could suggest I try to fix this issue?

Thanks,

Nita

Kris_Williams

Backup the file and then delete the entry, after taking a photo of it so you can put it back of it creates any problems

Acctd4

Hi Nita

The Supplier's "Balance Total" is not intended to be read as a current open balance - this column is simply an accumulation of EVERY entry under that Name.

Cheques always reflect as a negative in the transactions list because they are a payment (just like Bill payments do too) & if this Supplier happens to also have a current open Bill in the system, the negative balance is simply a reflection of the Bill amount minus the cheque payment 😀

Dianita

Thank you Kris and Shaz for your replies.

@Kris, I will see if my manager likes the sound of that. May try that in the next back up, perhaps create a test file of the back up file and test it there before doing anything in the live file. Thanks.

@Shaz, thanks for your response. Following that, the open balances do not all say negative though. Please see 3 examples in my snapshot below. The first one is the questioned one (circled in blue - with negative open balance) and there are 2 others in the previous months (circled in red - with $0 balance). Do bear in mind that these are not bill-payment cheques, but just normal cheque entries.

Any idea how we would explain this difference? Is there a fix? That's what I'm trying to fix by making them all consistently $0 (like the older 2 cheques).

Regards,

Nita

Acctd4

Hmmm .... the Open Balance column should reflect as zero so there may be some data corruption.

As Kris suggested, run the "Verify ...", then - regardless of whether errors are detected or not - run the "Rebuild ..." x 3.  

(3 times seems to be the magic number & will often fix these sorts of issues) 

On a side note, it's crucial that the file is verified either just before or as part of the "Backup ..." process - If you ever need to restore the file from a backup & there are any issues with the data, the backup is useless as it won't restore!

Dianita

Thank you Shaz,

Yes, It does seem that some errors need to be fixed by performing the 'verify and rebuild'. Since the Christmas - NY period is coming soon, I will propose to my manager that we have this done over that period if possible.

Regards,

Nita

Kris_Williams

Verify and rebuild normally doesn’t take too long, should be less than 30 minutes