Those of you who read my Blog regularly probably remember that I was having quite an accounting nightmare at my hand regarding this years tax paperwork. Good thing that the Austrian Tax Guys were on vacation for the past 2 weeks so that gave me a little room to breathe. Well that was until I looked at the tax paperwork for the German Sub-Company and realized that I was dealing exactly with the same issues. So I talked it over with the German Tax Guys and the agreed just to disregard the wrong Opening Balance Values. That gave me some time to deal with the issues. It was quite clear that it has to be dealt with otherwise the opening values will never ever be correct. And that means tha we will never ever be albe to lock any business year. And anyone who does anything in the accounting software can screw up already balance business yerars. So the only way was to fix the errors in 2 business years.
Here's in a nutshell what has happened. When entering the values for the opening balance the software enters the opening values in first business year that has not yet been locked. The software does not question if the can be right nor does it does it ask you if you really want to enter the opening values in that specific business year unless you specifically tell the software to enter the opening value in different business year than the first unlocked year. So what happend is that we ended up with entering the opening blance for 2012 into the business year of 2011. No we did have twice the opening blance in 2011 and were missing the opening blanace in 2012. But nobody really realized that, since I'm not really interested in openen values during the year. Those are of interest when I prepare the tax paperwork. And the "fun" of fixing that problem fell to me. Apparently I'm the one who knows the most about the software and has the nerves to start methodically working through that disaster. That's definitely one of the downsides of being an Main-Accountant.
First thing I did is to export the blanace of 2010 into Excel and than imort the data of the official tax paperwork. And then I checked if everything was balanced. It was a reflief to come to the comclusion that this was the case. There was no amount "hanging" on any of the Blanace Transfer Accounts. That told me that I "only" had to correct 2 business years.
Next up was the business year 2011. I exported the balance into Excel and imported the of the official tax paper work. I already knew that this would not be balanced. I even knew what the difference had to be. But somehow it was not going to be that easy. Here's the reason. The difference between what had been entered as Opening Balance and what the Opening Balance should have been according to the official tax paper work has to be exactly the amount that's "hanging" on the Transfer Banlance Account. But that just wasn't the case. So I did what every good accountant does. I kept my calm and controlled one position after the next one until I found the difference. I corrected those errors manually and now the differences were equal. I was happy about that. That meant that I only had to correct the opening blanace for 2011 and that no further action was necessary. Once that was done I checked the blance of the Accounting Software against the official Tax Paperwork and it matched up perfectly. No Difference in any of the Amounts and the Balance Transfer Account was balanced.
After that I moved on to the Business Year 2012. Used the exact same "Battle Plan" and it worked equally well. And yes I was very happy about it as this was really a very nice ending to my work week. Finally the Blanace issues in one Sub-Company are resolved. Next week I will have to deal with those differences in the second Sub-Company.
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