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Keeping Your Records on Computer

With the growing market of software products available for keeping your records on computer, it is important to maintain the same procedures and take the same precautions that you would if you were using a manual cashbook system.

By far the most important step in the record keeping process is to ensure that your 'books' are reconciled.  That is, that the balance in the cashbook agrees to the bank statement when adjusted for oustanding cheques and outstanding deposits.  By following the reconciliation process you ensure that all entries are picked up, both income and expenses, and ensures that bank statement items such as direct debits, interest and bank fees are not missed.

Important also is to regularly back-up your work, and also to make sure that the back-up actually contains the data it should.  It can only be by (tearful) experience that you find your back-up is empty.

At Cliftons we like to work from a good quality general ledger.  Good quality means that all transactions have been captured, treated properly for Goods and Services Tax (GST) if applicable and likewise transactions have been grouped under appropriate categories.  The general ledger shows us all transactions arranged per category or account.

The best way to provide your information to us is by giving us a back-up of you computer records, and telling us what program you use and what version of that program.  Due to our professional partnership and membership with the major software producers we have all versions available to us.  We just need to know the specifics of what you use.

Please keep the following in mind when preparing your computer records to send to us;

• Year End Close - Some programs (eg MYOB) allow/require you to close off one year and commence a new year.  This is a crucial process as it removes old transaction data and just keeps balances.  You should not close the year until we have finished with your financial statements, so you can adjust you records to match ours if you wish.  Under all circumstances BACK-UP before starting a new year.
• Back-up - As mentioned earlier you should regularly back-up your data.  Check your software instructions for details of how this is done.  Your back-ups should be done on a secure media such as CD, DVD, Zip disk or Flash drive.  These are much more reliable than floppy disks, and can hold far greater amounts of data.

Should you have any queries about backing up your data to provide to Cliftons, please contact one of our professional team.