How to reconcile your GL A/P account (on your Balance Sheet) to the figure on your A/P Aging Summary (Historical) report

If the A/P figure on your A/P Aging report and your Balance Sheet do not match, follow these steps to correct the problem:

• First
• Make sure that all transactions on the Batch Post GL Transactions screen are posted.
• Assuming that you may be comparing the figures for a date in the past, make sure that you are using the A/P Aging Summary (Historical) when comparing A/P figures for dates in the past.
• Next,
  
• Print the Detailed Trial Balance - Grouped by Operation report
• Enter 1/1/2000 in the From Date
• Enter the same To Date that you used for the Balance Sheet
• Select your A/P GL account in the Account drop down selection field.
• Click on the Summary option (in the top right corner, so you can view a 'Summary' of the transactions
• Click Print Preview or Print option
• Click the Preview button.
• After the report has been printed or print previewed, note that the total of all Debits and Credits are totaled under each 'Operation'.  The key here is to look for any Debits or Credits under an operation that does not look logical for the A/P account.   Valid Operations for the A/P account would generally be Debits and Credits with an Operation = Bill, Bill Payments, Bill-Reversal, Etc.. (or Beginning Balance, or any Year End Operations such as Close Year End and GL Compression).  Invalid Operations related to the A/P account would generally be almost any other Operation not mentioned above, but especially operations like GL Adjustment, Issue Check, Bank Deposit, Bank Adjustment, etc)
• If you find any Debits or Credits that you suspect are Invalid Operations, then close the report and re-open it following each of the same steps above, but instead of selecting the Summary option (on the Report Selection Screen), select the Detail option, which will reveal the details of which date(s), transactions, etc that were posted under each Operation.  When you see the detail you will be able to make a plan of action of what needs to be deleted or reversed.  (The A/P Aging Summary (Historical) report is based on the A/P transactions in the A/P Bills and A/P Bill Payments.  Any other Operation on the report are almost certainly wrong and the cause of the discrepancy between the reports. 
  
• If you get to this point...and you cannot see any postings that look like Invalid Operations, it is possible that OneSource has made postings to 1 or more A/P Bills that were in use (locked by) another user when the postings were made and/or from some type of bug. If you get to this point, the final step to make is to Batch Unpost and then repost any ranges of time where the reports don't match. (On the Batch Unpost GL Transactions screen, when you select the first drop down list, you would want to only un-post transactions related  to Payables).  
  
• NOTE1: If any of the suspected problems are in previous tax years AND if your Tax returns have already been filed, you may want to consider whether or not you want to go down the road of Batch Unposting transactions in tax years that have already been filed, as we typically have the opinion that a better solution is to make an adjustment to the GL before doing that.  
• NOTE2: When comparing General Ledger reports (such as your Balance Sheet) with any Sub Ledger report (such as your AP Aging Summary Historical)--and if they do not match and you are wondering 'which' to believe--our advice is almost always to believe the Sub Ledger report over the General Ledger--as the Sub Ledger is the source of all (or nearly all) numbers that affect the General Ledger.  For instance, if your AP Aging Summary shows your total AP owed is $200,000 (which every penny of the report is tied directly to an AP Bill) and your GL Balance Sheet GL Account for your AP is $210,000, you would assume that the $200,000 number is correct, because you will have proof of every dollar on that report.  Put another way, assuming you wanted to buy a business and the business owner had $210,000 of AP listed on their balance sheet, but could only link $200,000 to actual outstanding AP Bills, you would not want to accept any more than $200,000 of AP liabilities.
  
• If you have done all of the steps above...and the reports still do not match, then please contact technical support at OneSource Software for additional assistance.