7.10.4 Resetting Finance if you have never used Beacon Finance before

This is for Beacon Sites that have been using their system for some time and now want to use Finance.

As the system automatically puts in the ledger,  membership renewals and new members money there will lots of entries and these will impact on future use of the finance system.

Fig 1

In this example Fig 1 you can see a typical example.

The aim of this process is to ensure your ledgers are correct for the start of your financial year. You will also need to reconcile the accounts to remove, from the display, these historical transactions. If you don’t do this then they will clutter up the screen when reconciling your account(s) in the future.

Note we strongly recommend that you start using finance at the start of your financial year.

While this process may seem complex, we suggest that you just work through this step by step.

This process is using a Financial Year starting 1^st January. If your financial year is different then you will need to change the dates used to match it.

You may have multiple accounts to adjust so you should perform these actions on each one in turn.  The illustration following shows the process on the current account.

Step 1

Current Account

First you need to go to Reconcile and check the earliest date that you can work on. In this illustration it is : 2020.  See Fig 2

 Fig 2

You will need to reconcile this earlier year although the ledger shows 2020 (see fig. 2) the Reconciliation only goes back to 2021. (see fig. 3)

Fig 3

Step 2

Go to the ledger for 2021 financial year and note down the End of Year figure: £ 2241.18

Fig 4

You now go to Reconcile and enter the earliest year possible 2022 and the figure at the end of the financial year ending in 2022. (in our example £ 2241.18).

Press Show.

You will now see all transactions from this end date 31/12/2022, back to when the system was first used. This could be a very long list.

You need to tick each one until you have done them all. You can see below how you can Select All.   The Balance Difference will by £ 0.00.

You can now go to the foot of the page and reconcile account.

Warning this display and ticking of historical transactions can take some time and it appears as if the system is going slowly. This can be due to the size of file that is necessary for all of the transactions.

See below for this :

Fig 5

As long as the balance difference is Zero this will have removed these ticked transactions from your list. They remain in the ledger but cannot be removed or edited except from modifying the apportionment in the Analysis categories. Please see Reconciliation section as you can now edit these transactions. 7.5 Reconcile Account

Step3

Your End of Year balance should be correct but if not put in on last day of that financial year a correction transaction (Contra transaction). If your End-of-Year figure is too high, you put in a Payment Transaction of the amount necessary to make the End-of- Year correct.

If it is too low do the opposite. The details in the transaction should define what you are doing in terms of End of Year correction.  You need to make sure it is taking the balance to the correct figure and should be analysed to an appropriate category. You might want to set one up for End of Year Correction.

Once you have carried this out for all accounts, you will need to select Update B/F on each account for the current year. Note if you get this wrong you can use it multiple times.

This will set the start of year to the correct figure.

You can now start the new financial year.

Revision History

v1	2023-03-16	John Alexander	First version
v2	2023-03-20	John Alexander	Correction to number referring to fig 4
v3	2024-03-18	John Alexander	Add additional information for Select all in Reconcilation