Accounts

Clear Audit Trail

Once you have run the year end routine and archived the data, it can be a good idea to clear the audit trail depending on the number of transactions you have.  Clearing the Audit Trail removes transactions which meets a specific criteria.  An opening balance journal is posted that stands for the balance of the removed transactions. The audit trail history holds the details of the removed transactions.

Criteria

Clear Audit Trail removes all transactions that meet the following criteria:

• Date on or before the date you specify.
• Date must be before your current financial year.
• Fully paid.
• VAT reconciled, if applicable.
• Bank reconciled, if applicable.
• CIS reconciled, if applicable.
• If the transaction is allocated, the linked transactions must also meet all of the above criteria.

Any transaction that does not meet all of the above criteria are not cleared from the audit trail.

Memo – We recommend running Clear Audit Trail routine on the computer that holds your accounts data. This routine might take some time.

Clearing the Audit Trail affects retrospective reports that use transactional data, we recommend running any important reports before clearing the transactional history, remember you can always go into your archive data to run reports.

To Clear Audit Trail

1. Click Tools then click Period End and Clear Audit Trail.
2. Enter the date you want to clear transactions up to and click Clear audit trail.
3. Create a backup, click Browse and select the required folder for the backup and click OK, then click OK and click OK.
4. To view the removed transactions, click OK then click Close and click Close.

Postings

When you run a Clear Audit Trail, an opening balance journal posts to your nominal codes to replace the removed transactions.

You can then remove old, unused records, invoices and orders and then compress your data, see earlier articles on how to do this.

If you would like help on Clearing the Audit Trail or removing old records, invoices and orders and compressing your data or need any other help with your Sage Accounts, please contact us

Payroll 

Payroll New Year

1. Check you’ re using the correct version.

Before you start processing the new tax year, you must have installed the update for the 2024/25 tax year, V30.00.226.

2.     Update your NI rates.

The spring Budget 2024 announcement included a reduction in the main rate of employees’ National Insurance for the 2024/25 tax year.

You must update your NI rates in Sage 50 Payroll V30, before you process a 2024/25 payroll.

3. Update your employees’ tax codes.

For the 2024/25 tax year, the personal allowance and emergency tax code remains the same at £12,570 and 1257L. This means you do not need to change your employees’ tax codes unless informed by HMRC.

You do however need to remove the week 1 / month 1 flag on any employees’ tax codes before processing in the new tax year.

4. Small employers’ relief

If you are eligible for Small Employers’ Relief (SER) (previous years gross National Insurance must be less than £45,000), you need to set your Sage Payroll to calculate and claim it.

5. Apply for Employment Allowance

TIP: make sure your process date is set to 6/04/2024 before completing this.

In the 2024/25 tax year the employment allowance allows eligible employers to reduce their annual Employers National Insurance liability by up to £5,000.

Submit the Employer Payment Summary (EPS) for Employment Allowance

1. Click Company, then click Settings.
2. Click the Apply for EA
3. From the State Aid drop-down menu, select one of the following options:

• Applicable
• Not Applicable

If State Aid is applicable, select the relevant State Aid Sector. For more information on State aid, visit Gov.uk.

4. Click Submit then click Continue, then click Submit then Submit

At this stage, HMRC receives an EPS with Employment Allowance application.

• If your application is unsuccessful, you receive a notification in your IR Secure Mailbox within five working days.
• If you don’t hear back from HMRC, then your application has been successful, and you can then select the Eligible for Employment Allowance check box within Company then Settings. Once you select this check box, your software is set up to calculate Employer Allowance.

Memo

If you select the Eligible for Employment Allowance check box after you have already processed one or more tax months, you must re-run your P32 for each month of the tax year starting from month 1. Sage 50 Payroll then calculated the Employment Allowance due in each period and records these values in Company Settings > HMRC Payments of your software.

6. Pensions Data Exchange

If you use the Pensions Data Exchange (PDX) to send data to your provider, there are some additional steps to complete at the start of the tax year.

If you need help running your payroll year end routine or setting up for the new Payroll year or need any other help or advice with your payroll, please contact us

We can also provide a remote access service where we can link into your computer to help you resolve your Sage Accounts or Payroll problems.

Accounts

Running a year end routine

Once you have passed your accounts year end and you have check you are ready to run a year end routine, please see last month’s newsletter on what to do, you are ready to run your yearend accounts routine.

The year end routine does several different things.

1. It advances your accounts year by one, letting you run profit and loss reports for the current year etc.
2. Each nominal code that is included as part of the Profit and Loss in the Chart of Accounts is zeroed and a revering figured entered and the difference is posted to the Retain Profit nominal code e.g. 3200 Profit and Loss
3. Archive’s your data.
4. You can also set nominal and stock budgets if required.

Running the yearend routine

1. Click Tools, point to Period End, and then click Year End.
2. Click Check Data – caution any errors etc need to be corrected before continuing.
3. Have zero errors? Click Close.
4. Click Check COA, then click OK, receive an error, this needs to be corrected before you go any further.
5. Click Backup, select the files you want to be included in the backup. We recommend changing the name of the Sage backup to include the year end date e.g. VitalsupportYE 31.03.24.001, this backup needs to be retained and stored in a safe place. You might want to take more than one backup.
6. To Archive your company data, select the Archive check box (archiving your data lets you create a copy of your data which you can access to run reports for previous years and view data which you might have cleared down).
7. Confirm the details on the Archive Company Window.
8. To set up budgets for your new financial year, select the Budgets check box and choose your budget options.
9. Check the date is in the year you are closing and, enter a lock date to prevent postings before a certain date, this stops people from accidently posting back into last year after you have run the year end routine.
10. Click Run Year End then click Yes and click OK.
11. Select how you want to output the report, click OK, then click OK

Memo – We recommend running the year end routine on the computer that holds your accounts data. The year end procedure might take some time. If the software freezes when running the year end, do not close it, as the year end procedure may still be running.

If you would like help checking your accounts or correcting items before running the year end or would like help running your yearend routine or need any other help with your Sage Accounts, please contact us

Payroll

Sage 50 Payroll V30 New Features

New Home Page

The new Home Page is an easy way to keep informed on features, access support videos and webinars etc, ensuring you are always up to date.  In V30 the Home Page openings by default when you log into a company, but you can easily change view to process the wages, and if you prefer you can go into defaults and set the Employee list to be your default.

Legislation for 2023/2024

Sage 50 Payroll V30 includes the latest legislation for the new tax year.

Key Changes

• Statutory Paternity Pay – deals with the changes to Statutory Paternity Pay (SPP) and Statutory PP Adoption Pay (SPPA).
• Statutory Maternity Pay – from the 24/25 tax year, in line with HMRC guidance, SMP can be processed when the gender is set o female or male in an employee record.
• NHS pension scheme – changes to the NHS Pension tiers from April 2024.
• Investment Zone National Insurance categories

P45 Values

When you enter a new employee’s P45 values you must only enter values for the tax year you are processing.

For the V30, the P45 year to date fields are not available when you should not enter them.  This occurs when the date left previous employment is not in the same tax year as your Process Date in Sage 50 Payroll.

Pension Data Exchange (PDX) error improvements

Sage have added clickable links within the most common errors in PDX.  These links will take you straight to the relevant support guide for these errors, helping you to process the pensions quicker.

If you need help installing Sage 50 V30 Payroll or need help running your payroll yearend routine or need any other help or advice with your payroll, please contact us

We can also provide a remote access service where we can directly link into your computer to help you resolve your Sage Accounts or Payroll problems.

Accounts

Prepare for year end

At the end of your financial year, you need to run the year end routine in Sage 50 Accounts before you can close your current financial year.

Before you do this, it is advisable to do few basic checks to ensure your yearend runs smoothly.

Enter all transactions

Make sure you have posted all transactions for the financial year you’re closing.

These may include:

• Checking that all bank accounts are reconciled, and all unpresented items checked to make sure they are valid.
• Aged Debtors reports checked; any bad debts written off etc.
• Aged Creditor reports checked, any missing invoices or credit notes added etc.
• VAT return run and submitted if VAT quarter coincides with yearend.
• Enter any adjustments from your accountant. These would normally be posted as a journal.
• Run month end routine for depreciation, prepayments and accruals.
• Enter closing and opening stock postings if required.

Check you chart of accounts

The chart of accounts defines which category each nominal code falls.

When the year end is run, the chart of accounts decides which nominal codes to clear down, and which balances to carry forward.  It is therefore important to check the chart of accounts.

To check

1. Click Nominal codes then click Chart of accounts.
2. Select the chart of accounts you want to view and then click Edit.
3. To check for any duplicated or missing nominal codes or if any ranges overlap click Check.
4. If the following message appears “No errors found in this chart of accounts”, you chart of accounts is complete and you are good to carry on.

If prompted to print a Chart of Accounts Error report, you have problems which need to be fixed before you can run the year end.

Run year end reports

Print any management reports you required such as

• Trial Balance
• Profit and Loss
• Balance Sheet

There are various other various other reports you can run, and it is up to you what information you want.  All these reports can be run again from the Archive data once you have run the year end if need.

If you would like help checking your accounts or correcting items before running the year end or need any other help with your Sage Accounts, please contact us

Payroll

Set up and maintain your users

You can easily set up access rights on your software so that different users can log in and help process your payroll.  You can also restrict access to certain areas of the software.

Before any users are set up, there are a few things you need to check:

• You need to log into your payroll with a username that has access to the Access Rights option. The MANAGER username has access by default.
• You can create multiple users by following these steps, however your software licence decides how many users can log in at any one time. In your software click Help, then About to check your user limit.

To set up a new user

Make sure you are logged in as manager.

1. On the menu bar, click Tasks, the click Security.
2. Click Access Rights.
3. In the Users section, click Add.
4. Enter a Logon name and password for the new user.
5. Click

Now you want to give you user specific access rights.  In the table below we have listed the post popular ways to do this.  One you have finished. Click OK.

Restrict access to certain areas of the software – In Allow Access To These Areas: check the boxes for the areas you would like the user to have access to.  Alternatively, click Select All and just de-select the areas you do not want them to access.

Give the user full access rights – In Employee Record Access, select all check boxes, set the access Level to 9 and check the box to Include lower levels.  Then in Allow Access To These Areas, click Select All.

Access to only certain Pay frequency employees – In the Employee Access section, select the required pay element check boxes e.g. Four Weekly

Give the user access based on employee access levels – In Employee Access Level, choose the relevant level up to which the user can access.  The access level is located in the Analysis field of each employee’s record.  By default, each employee’s record has an access level of zero, except for directors who have a level of 9.

For example, if you set the username as level 6, that user can access and process any employees on that level.  If you also select the ‘Include lower levels’ checkbox, this user can access records from level 0 through 6, but not 7 to 9.

Suppress Non-Essential Messaging – select the checkboxes in this section as required to hide non essential messaging for this user.  Leave the checkboxes clear to keep this messaging active.

Login with a different Username

Once you have set up your user, you can easily switch from the current user to a different user.

Simply click File, then click Logout & login with a different username and enter the required username and password, then click OK.

If need help setting up different users or need any other help or advice with your payroll, please contact us

We can also provide a remote access service where we can directly link into your computer to help you resolve your Sage Accounts or Payroll problems.