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My AP Does Not Balance to the GL in Sage ERP Accpac!

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Sooner or later, it happens.  You run your AP Aged Payables Report, and compare the total to the balance in your GL, (AP trade account), and they are not equal.  What now?

A reconciliation will need to be done, there’s no getting away from that.  You will need to do a comparison between all the transactions that have gone through AP and cross them off against all the entries in the GL Listing to find out which one(s) are different and/or missing.  This can be a tedious process.  However, there are a couple of tips and tricks that might help short-circuit the task.

1. Ensure all your AP batches have been sent to the GL.  (AP Periodic Processing / Create GL Batches).  Then, POST all the AP batches in the GL.  Re-run your reports to see if we are now in balance.
2. Run your reports as of a future period, such as the end of the current fiscal year.  Sometimes AP transactions get posted to prior periods.  After they get sent to the GL, the period may be adjusted to a current period before posting.  (So as not to affect an already published financial statement, for example, or because that period has already been closed).  Therefore, the imbalance may only be due to a fiscal period discrepancy, and will even out at a later period.  This is not normally a concern unless it crosses over a year end. 
3. Under GL Transaction History, select the AP trade account.  Change the source code to different modules besides AP and check if there are any entries which originated from somewhere besides AP.  These entries may be the cause of the variance.

If these 3 tricks don’t reveal the difference between your subledger and your GL, a full reconciliation will be required.  Here’s how to make that process simpler:

1. Locate the last fiscal period where the AP and the GL were in balance.  Use that as a starting point to begin your reconciliation.
2. Identify the variance amounts for each subsequent period since AP & GL were in balance. 
   1. If several subsequent periods are out of balance by the same amount, locating and adjusting the first of those periods will bring the following ones into balance.
   2. If the periods are out of balance by different amounts, then there are variances in each period that need to be identified.

In this example, period 4 is balanced, and there are discrepancies in periods 5, 7 and 8.  The reconciliation process needs to begin at period 5.  Depending on the adjustments required to bring period 5 into balance, (the AP may need to be increased, or the GL amount decreased, or some combination of these), the variance amounts of periods 7 and 8 may be changed, therefore it will be imperative to start the reconciliation at the earliest period that is out of balance.

1. Print the GL Transaction Listing for the AP trade account for period 5.  Then print either of the AP Transaction reports – Vendor Transactions, or GL Transactions – depending on which one works best for your particular set of data. 
2. Compare each of the entries in the GL to each transaction on the AP report.  Once each line item has been compared and crossed off with its match, you should be left with the ‘orphan’ entries – your variance.  You could also export each of these reports into excel and use some sorting and comparison formulas to assist with this task.
3. Now that you have the source of your discrepancy, you will be able to correct the imbalance by making the appropriate adjustments. 

This process is identical for the AR subledger as well. 

There are some settings which can be optimized for reconciliation purposes. 

1. Ensure your AP trade account is set to be a ‘control account’ which allows only AP transactions to be posted into it.  (GL Accounts / Accounts – select ‘control account’ and then add ‘AP’ to the ‘subledger’ tab)
2. Check your AP Setup / GL Integration / Transactions.  Set your Detail Transaction Types (invoice, credit note, payment, etc) to have easily recognizable fields sent to the GL Detail Reference and GL Detail Description columns (vendor number and document number for example).  This will make identifying specific AP transactions easier in the GL Transactions Listing report. 

 Give us a call if you need assistance with this!