adjustment to accounts payable

[scottieboy61]

I have a new client. The accounts payable balanace was inaccurate because bills entered into the account were not always paid with the pay bills window. I made a general journal entry to adjust the balance. The chart of accounts reflects the correct balance, however the balanace sheet does not.

Please offer me a solution.

This company file has been used for 6 years. Would it be better to start a new file or to male the adjustment to the existing accounts. There are many innaccurate entries in the chart of accounts.

[brecor]

If your coa a/p accounts is correct but balance sheet not, that most likely is you are not running that balance sheet report with a date covering all transactions in the a/p account. More than likely something in the a/p is in the future and the balance sheet report date isn't going that far.

[PHebert]

Well the biggest issue is the inherent nature of QuickBooks. Journal entries should only be used as a last resort and in some situations never.

There are four recommended methods. The first is to replace the check(s) with a bill payment. If you have a number of checks, this could get to be a little work intensive.

Option 2 - is not useful for your situation.

Option 3 - If there are numerous checks involved, edit each check and code to Accounts Payable. This will create a credit that can be used to offset the bill.

Option 4 - is not the preferred method and has potential problems. Care should be used! If the correct expense accounts were posted by the check, delete bill. This option deletes vendor information and should be used with caution.

The standard journal entry does not provide any vendor reference and consequently, the Accounts Payable balance has information that is outside of report formats. As a result, I would have anticipated the reverse outcome from the scenario you have described. Where the Balance Sheet is correct, but other areas are wrong.

There is also the issue of the "journal entry" bug in QuickBooks. If you are using a name in the first line of the journal enry. QuickBooks will use that name for all the rest of the lines unless you replace with another name. This could put costs where they do not belong.

Suffice it to say that using a standard journal entry to fix this problem is not recommended.

[james-ca]

If it were my client I'd be going back to the last set of accounts, and either adjusting the existing file to agree, then work on correcting the current year, or starting over.

Sounds like theres a lot of inaccuracies apart from the A/P one that you mention.

Regards
Mike