I did as suggested, but I still get this error when trying to leave History Mode and process all of my first months transactions - can you help?

Hi Richard,

What date did you start using Sage 50/stop using your old bookkeeping system? - (July 1, 2016)

On the Trial balance or Balance sheet of your old system, how much did your customers owe you? ($133,124.50 (from trial balance from Accountant - we did not use a system before, and I started here in October))

What was the total of all the invoices your customers owed on the last day using your old system? ($133,124.50)

What date was the entry for the payment through square in your first post in this thread? (July 19, 2016)

Do the closing balances of each account in your old system match the opening balances entered in Sage 50? Check under Setup, Setup Guide, Accounts to see all the opening balance amounts. (Yes, they match as I put them all in from the trial balance itself)

What was your old bookkeeping system? (None)

What is your fiscal year? (July 1 2016 - June 30, 2017)

That is why I'm not understanding either...everything was entered into opening account balances correctly, at the $133,124.50 balance. I applied payments received throughout July (recorded as payments against each customer and outstanding historical invoices). The total I have outstanding for historical transactions at the end of July should match to the $17,399.85.

Did I do this wrong as per the instructions above?? 

Up above in a past post, you answered the question

beckyt said:

What was the total of all the invoices your customers owed on the last day using your old system? ($133,124.50)

This should have been the balance of that Customer Aged Detail report.

I can't see how your accountant can give you a total owing by your customer on Jun 30/16 of $576.02 that includes the amount Square took off on Jul 19 when on Jun 30, the accountant didn't know the customer was going to pay via Square, nor what that discount fee would be.

At this point, I have been assuming that Square actually deposited the $576.02 to your account after taking their discount.  If that is the case, then the original amount paid was $597.45.  So the account 1200 balance is incorrect.

If you edit the Opening balance of account 1200, then you will have to send the difference to another account.  Check all the opening balances on the accounts on your balance sheet with the financials at June 30/16 to make sure you have not entered any others incorrectly as opening balances and if you find they are all correct, I would post the difference to Retained Earnings.  There is probably another account that is off by the $21.43 but the amount is so small I would not necessarily spend a lot of time trying to figure it out.  Because June 30 is the company year end, you are only dealing with Balance Sheet accounts to balance, so you can't send the amount to the income statement.

If an adjustment needs to be done to balance Retained Earnings at year end, the accountant will pick it up and post it.

Or, you can talk with the accountant and ask what to do.

Thanks Richard. I think the issue is that we switched accountants half way through the year, and they literally just submitted our corporate taxes in December for fiscal year ending June 30th. They did have copies of everything that was paid in July, August, September, so did in fact enter the discounted price into AR minus the square processing fee. I can see in the ledger they put the square fee towards interest and banking charges but don't know the balance account - very well could be retained earnings as you stated above. To be fair, when I started in October, and took the Sage training in January, I have a backlog of 8 months to enter now, and the accountant previously was given BUCKETS and BOXES of paperwork and receipts, including thousands of visa receipts. If I'm out $21.43 overall, I don't think it's worth digging too much for, you're correct.

I will change my 1200 AR opening balance July 1st to be $133,145.93 and post the $21.43 difference to retained earning to move on with my year.

Thanks so much for all of your help.

Can you show the details of the 3 entries to us?

If J95 was a Receivable->Payment applied to an invoice that had been entered AND you had Square already set up as a credt card with a discount rate, then the 21.43 would be accounted for in J95 and there would be no need to re-enter it in a separate journal entry.

But that means for every receipt from Square, we have to make another entry between our operating bank, our Square "bank" and credit card charges?  In a month, we have 100+ entries from Square - that's a lot of additional entries.  And one monthly entry would make reconciling the operating bank more difficult.

The problem is Square (and other credit card providers) charges a different rate depending on what credit card was actually used.  There should be a field in Sage 50 in the Receipts to enter our own variable processing fee amount, not just a straight percentage.

Dovienya,

You would not do it this way if the Square fee is not a set percentage. The problem with what you propose - having an extra field to enter a cc fee % on the fly - is that you usually can't anticipate why they charge 3c more for this card or 7c more for that card etc... (DUE TO WHAT A LOVELY WELL RUN AND *l*o*l* TRANSPARENT *l*o*l* CC INDUSTRY (BANKING INDUSTRY as a whole) WE HAVE)

We have the same issue with Moneris - not a set %. Our fee, however, is not shaved off each transaction. Moneris deposits the whole amount to us and then deducts their percentages in lump sums for each card (V,M,A,D) at month end. So, we do it this way:
- Instead of bank account, the sale amount goes to Visa receipts or MC receipts.
- At month end, each card type just gets 2 entries:
    - Visa deposits cleared by bank  (move the actual NET we receive) from Visa receipts to bank acct
    - Visa fees paid this month (move from Visa receipts to expense acct for CC processing fees)

(Visa receipts acct should end up at 0 each month)

If your fees are not predictable (not a set %), even though Square may remove their amounts immediately, I would just do the same. Assuming you are offered a way to get some type of monthly summary - sit down after month end and calculate total fees deducted during that month for each of Visa, MC, etc.

PayPal is the same - they deduct a fee right away. Although we do in this case have PayPal CAD and PayPal USD set as bank accounts, we still don't adjust each transaction for fees - just 1 general journal at month end for each currency is sufficient, keeping a copy of the statement as reference.