I'm in the process of taking over all the book-keeping & admin for my husbands business as my MIL who has been Company Secretary for the last 40 years is retiring end July. I'm just learning as previously I was an IT Implementation Consultant/Project Manager.
MIL has been teaching me her way of doing things over the last 8mths, she did work for an Accountant 45 years ago but isn't formally qualified so I'm home studying for the AAT Book-keeping Certficate when time permits as I want to understand the correct industry standard way & to be taken seriously by our Accountant who has advised I should start using Sage from 1st August which we have just purchased & installed on my laptop.
MIL who is totally non-techie believes I should continue with the manual books but I'm keen to see if I can off-load some of the manual duplication as I'll be parellel running both systems until I feel confident in my book-keeping ability & that sage is working effectively for us.
Currently we have the following books of original entry:
Sales day book, purchase day book, Journal where we enter only the totals from the first two books & then enter all payments made or received, double entry book that everything goes into, petty cash book, post book & wages book.
As I'll be entering all sales and puchase invoices onto sage I'm hoping I can do away with those books & just keep the journal & double entry book.
Can anyone see any pitfalls with this?
Any advice with the best way to move forward would be much appreciated.
Best way forward is to run two systems together until you are confident in SAGE and then ditch the manual records and do everything on SAGE.
Would go on a few SAGE courses if you can to get up to speed to how it works or what you can do on it. Better still invest in a couple of days bespoke 1 to 1 training with a local training provider.
Agree with Mark, but if you have a bit of time have a practice and play on the demo version of sage it does not effect your own data but allows you to see the the effect of posting various entries in to sage , if you are a little unsure of what you are doing take regular backups and if the worst happens you can always restore data, before doing this take note of transaction numbers.
Sage does all the double entries in one transaction, which saves a lot of time.
