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What to check when running the Year End
It is essential to complete certain tasks prior to running the Year End procedure, to ensure that everything runs smoothly thereafter.
Retained Income Account
If you are running a Year End on a particular company for the first time, you need to ensure that the retained income exists. To create this account, go to Edit | General Ledger Accounts and click on the 
icon. Create this account with the details as below :
Completing a Stock Take
It is critical to do the stock take or inventory count before the Year End process occurs, to ensure that the correct amount is reflected on your balance sheet for Year End reporting.
By completing the stock take, you are ensuring that the theoretical count (stock count on the system) is the same as the physical count (the manual process of counting stock items on hand). Should there be differences, the system will make the necessary adjustments to reflect the quantities as you capture them. The Inventory Count Assistant will guide you through the process of counting inventory quantities, and then reconciling physical and theoretical quantity differences.
Foreign Currency Revaluation
Foreign currency transactions cannot be revalued for prior financial periods. It is therefore essential that the correct foreign exchange rates are entered as well as ensuring that the foreign currency revaluation is processed.
Deleted Users
There may have been cases where a particular user needed to be deleted off the system. When running the Year End process, you may receive an error that there are open batches for this user. To fix this, you need to re-create the deleted user by going into Setup | Users/Passwords. You will be then able to see the open batches that were created under that deleted user. Update them and you will be able to process the Year End.
Bank Reconciliation
Since Pastel Partner and Xpress retains data for 2 years, it is very important to make sure that you have updated all your bank recons for the current financial year. The reason for this is that cheques or any transactions processed in the cashbook in the prior financial period will not reflect on the bank reconciliation once the Year End has been run. This is because when you run the Year End, the system takes the current year’s transactions and puts them into last year and the last year’s data will then be lost on that company.
Pastel Backup
You must save backups on removable media such as CDs or memory sticks. A backup on the same physical computer as the data is inadequate. You should also keep some of these copies in a separate geographical location to ensure their safety.
We recommend the following backup regime:
- Daily backups made onto separate backup devices, one for each day of the week. In other words, do not overwrite the previous day’s backup with a current one. Using this daily strategy, you can go back 5 working days if you need to.
- Additional backups made at the end of every week, again on separate devices. This lets you go back a few weeks if you need to.
- An additional backup made at the end of each month, which you keep for at least a financial year.
- An additional backup made at the end of the financial year, which you keep forever.
Pastel IronTree Backup
This is an online backup service, into which you can upload your data. This provides you with safe, secure, and off-site backups. You can use this service instead of, or in conjunction with, the standard backup facility. Use the File...Pastel IronTree Online backups menu to access and use Pastel IronTree.
Please note that Pastel IronTree is a pay-as-you-use service, which requires monthly payments.
- Pastel IronTree provides you with the ability to do an offsite backup of ALL your critical data in a 100% secure manner automatically.
- Pastel IronTree provides 100% secure online backup, a simple registration process, simple installation, affordable pricing, and secure hosting.
- Pastel IronTree's infrastructure is replicated and mirrored so all data is stored in multiple locations. Thus the chances of losing your backups are virtually nonexistent.
- Pastel IronTree's backup technology has been in use internationally for years. Pastel IronTree uses a 448bit encryption model, which is 3 times as secure as regular internet banking. Without your encryption key, no-one can decrypt your data once you backup.
- The Pastel IronTree solution can back up any data that you choose at any time, with the use of additional plug-ins. You can vary the data selection by adding or deleting files or folders at any time.
To read more on this, visit www.pastelirontree.co.za
