Chapter 23

Ten (Or More) Wizards to Conjure

In This Chapter

Looking at how wizards can help you perform tricky transactions

Investigating the more helpful wizards and how they work

Sage helpfully provides a number of wizards. No, I don’t mean little characters with pointy hats and wands. By wizards, I mean step-by-step instructions on how to carry out specific procedures. Sometimes they can be a bit long and laborious to use, but at other times they provide some much needed expertise. For example, they can help you to complete complicated journal entries – even the most dedicated bookkeepers can do with a bit of help sometimes!

Here, I provide a brief summary of the most helpful wizards that Sage offers.

Creating a New Customer Account

Using the navigation bar on the left side of your screen, click Customers and then New Customer in the Task pane. The New Customer wizard starts, taking you step-by-step through the seven-window process of setting up your customers. As the wizard can take a long time, I use the quicker method of clicking Customer and then Record, but you may prefer the wizard’s guidance, so make sure that you grab a cuppa first!

To have a look at the type of questions that you’re asked as you work through the wizard, press the F1 function key. The Sage Help facility describes in detail the type of information you need to enter in each of the seven windows.

Setting up a New Supplier

Using the navigation bar, click Suppliers and then New Supplier in the Task pane. The New Supplier wizard walks you through the process of setting up your supplier records, just as the New Customer wizard takes you through setting up your customer records – wizards are handy, but not too imaginative. The seven windows you complete help you set up supplier names, addresses, contact details, credit details, bank details and settlement discounts, if applicable.

If you want to preview the types of information required to complete the wizard, have a look at Sage Help. Press the F1 function key and scroll up and down the screen to see for yourself.

You don’t have to complete every field in the wizard to set up a supplier, but you do need to click through all seven windows to get to the end and save what information you’ve entered, so stick with it! You can always add information to your supplier record at a later date if you feel that you’ve missed anything out – simply open the supplier record, make your changes and click Save – it’s that easy!

Helpfully, the final stage of both the customer and supplier wizards allows you to enter opening balances, so you need to remember you’ve already done this when you’re reading Chapter 4.

Initiating a New Nominal Account

Use the Nominal Record wizard to create new nominal accounts to utilise in your Chart of Accounts. You only need to work through five screens – what a relief! From the navigation bar, click Company and then the New icon, which starts the wizard for you.

The wizard asks you to enter the name of your new nominal account and confirm what type of account it is – sales, purchase, direct expenses, overheads, assets, liabilities and so on.

You’re then asked to enter your nominal category from within the Chart of Accounts – for example, product sales. It also asks you to type in your nominal code.

Save yourself some annoyance and decide on your nominal code before you start the wizard. At this point in the wizard, you don’t have the option of searching your nominal code list to check if your chosen code is suitable.

After you’ve clicked Next, the wizard asks if you want to post an opening balance. Click the appropriate answer, and then click Create. Some new boxes appear asking you whether it’s a Debit or a Credit balance and the date and the amount. Click Create and the new account is prepared.

Don’t forget to check your Chart of Accounts for any errors after you enter new nominal accounts. You can find details on how to do this in Chapter 2.

Creating a New Bank Account

The Sage New Bank Account wizard enables you to open new bank accounts. The first four windows ask the usual bank details, such as bank name, sort code, account number and so on. The last window allows you to enter your opening balances.

From the navigation bar, click Bank, and then click the New icon.

Launching a New Product

Use the New Product wizard to create a new product record. You’re asked to enter descriptions of the product, selling price and cost price information, as well as nominal codes and supplier details. It also has a section on opening balances that allows you to enter those through the wizard.

To access the wizard, from the navigation bar, click Products and then click the New icon. Alternatively, you can click New Product from the Task pane on the navigation bar, instead of clicking the New icon.

Starting Up a New Project

You can use the New Project wizard to create a new project record. Chapter 13 talks in more depth about creating projects to keep track of a job’s progress.

You’re asked to enter details such as the project name and unique reference, which can be just a shortened name or number to identify the project. Enter information such as the project start date and end date and choose a status from the five pre-defined ones Sage that provides. If you can link the project to a customer, enter those details. The next couple of windows are optional and contain questions such as the site address and site contact details. The last window requires you to enter the price you quoted for the project.

To access the Project wizard, click the New icon from the Projects module, or click New Project from the Task pane on the Projects navigation bar.

Helping Out at Month-End: Opening/Closing Stock

Click Modules from the main toolbar, and then click Wizards. Choose Opening Closing Stock Wizard to access this wizard, which forms part of the month-end routine and is a welcome method of recording your closing stock. The wizard records the amount of closing stock you have at the end of a period and then transfers it to the start of the next period. The theory is that, by recording your opening and closing stock figures, the cost of sales figures can be accurately calculated by the wizard for your Profit and Loss report. (Cost of Sales = Opening Stock + Purchases – Closing Stock.) If you don’t post opening and closing stock figures, the cost of sales only reflects the purchase cost and doesn’t reflect stock that you have left to sell.

Work through the three screens, entering the required information and clicking Next to proceed to the end of the wizard.

The wizard asks you to confirm the closing stock nominal accounts in both your Balance Sheet and the Profit and Loss report. At the Entering Your Closing Stock Values screen, Sage asks you to enter the value of this closing stock and that of the previous closing stock. Sage then calculates the double-entry bookkeeping and posts those entries when you click the Finish button.

Fuelling Up: Scale Charges

If your firm has lots of company car users, the Scale Charges wizard can really come in handy. The wizard allows you to calculate the fuel-scale charges levied against free fuel provided to employees using company cars for personal use. The charges are dependent on the carbon-dioxide emissions and engine-size of each car.

You have to enter the fuel-scale charge details, and then Sage creates the journals necessary to post to the nominal ledger.

Before you proceed with the wizard, you need to have calculated the scale charge for each company vehicle. You can find this information on the scale-charge table provided in HM Revenue and Customs Public Notice 700/64; go to www.hmrc.gov.uk.

Helping with Your Bookkeeping: VAT Transfer

Known as the VAT Liability Transfer wizard, this wizard sounds very complicated, and it can be if you don’t understand double-entry bookkeeping. (Have a look at Bookkeeping For Dummies, by Jane Kelly, Paul Barrow and Lita Epstein for more help on double-entry.) This wizard helps you create the VAT transfer journals necessary to clear down your VAT Liability account. Still as clear as mud? Read on.

Essentially, the double-entry system reverses the balances in both the Sales Tax control account and the Purchase Tax control account at the end of the quarter and places an equal and opposite entry in the VAT Liability account. In theory, the balance subsequently created in the VAT Liability account is equal to the amount owed at that quarter-end. Therefore, when the VAT has been paid across or reclaimed from HMRC for the quarter and that payment or refund is coded to the VAT Liability account, the balance on the VAT Liability account should be zero – assuming that you’ve done all the bookkeeping correctly. Phew! The wizard makes going through this process a breeze.

You can’t use this wizard until you’ve fully reconciled and printed your VAT return.

Saving Time: Global Changes

The Global Changes wizard helps you make global changes to information in customer, supplier or product accounts without having to change each account individually. For example, you can raise the selling price of all your products by 10 per cent, as the sample business in Figure 23-1 did, just like that! (I don’t recommend such an abrupt and significant change, however, lest you lose more than 10 per cent of your customers!)

Work through each of the windows, selecting the appropriate boxes for your global change. When you’re happy with the details and can see the results shown on screen, click Finish. Sage then activates the changes. How’s that for a brilliant and simple way to save yourself some time!

Handling Currencies: Foreign Trader Setup

You have to complete the Foreign Trader Setup wizard to activate the foreign currency functionality in Sage Accounts Professional.

After you activate the Foreign Trader option, you can’t switch it off!

To activate the Foreign Trader, from the main toolbar, click Modules⇒Wizards⇒Foreign Trader Setup Wizard.

The Foreign Trader Setup wizard is short but sweet. Although it only runs to two screens, the impact of activating it is immense. The first thing the wizard asks you to do is set up a new nominal account to handle currency fluctuations. When dealing with foreign currencies, you often encounter different exchange rates between sending invoices and receiving payment from them. These different rates result in slight under- or overpayments on accounts, and a foreign currency fluctuation account is an account to post those under- or overpayments to. If you’ve selected the default range of nominal codes, an exchange-rate variance code already exists, which you can use.

Sage also asks you which exchange-rate update method you want to use. You can change exchange rates on individual transactions, but it may be better to update the currency record as well. Sage recommends that you use the default offsetting, which always prompts you to save exchange-rate changes so that you can keep on top of things when you alter any record.

The other exchange-rate update options include automatically saving any exchange-rate changes to the currency record and never saving any exchange-rate changes to the currency record.

When you complete the wizard, Sage recommends that you check the currency codes, symbols and currency exchange rates before you continue any further. Wise words!

Keeping Others in the Loop: Accountant Link

The Accountant Link is a very useful facility that enables you to send a copy of your data to your accountant via email or post. In the past, if you sent data to your accountant, you had to stop work and wait for the adjustments to your accounts. Nowadays, the Accountant Link allows you to send the data to your accountant, but still continue to work on the data yourself in the meantime, minimising disruption within your business.

After you export the data to your accountant, Sage begins to record material changes that you make to the data. You can print a list of these changes, and your accountant may request a copy of them before sending the data back to you. The accountant can send the data, with adjustments, back to you via a secure file, and you can then import those changes. The Accountant Link helps you apply the accountant’s adjustments to your data to bring it up to date. At this point, the program stops recording material changes.

The Accountant Link wizard takes you through the exporting and importing process step by step (refer to Chapter 19 for more details).