Summary

For some companies, the festive period can be a quiet time and you should make the most of any quiet periods to tidy up your accounts.  This can help improve efficiency during your busier periods.

Keeping your Sage Accounts tidy can speed up processing.  You can remove old record and reduce the size of your data files.

How can I tidy up my Sage 50 accounts?

Taking an archive

1. Click Tools then click Period End.

2. Click Archive Company.

3. If required, amend the description and folder name.

NOTE: Certain alphanumeric characters can’t be used when creating a folder, for example, < > . \ ? % *

4. Click OK and click OK.

Clear audit trail

The Clear Audit Trail option removes all transactions that meet the following criteria:

• Dated up to or on the date specified in the Clear Audit Trail option.
• Date must be prior to your current financial year.
• Fully paid.
• VAT reconciled, if applicable.
• Bank reconciled, if applicable.
• If you use the CIS module, transactions must be CIS reconciled.
• If the transaction is allocated, the linked transactions must also meet all of the above criteria.

Any transactions that don’t meet all of the above criteria aren’t cleared from the audit trail.

Follow the below steps to clear the audit trail:

1. On the menu bar click Tools then click Period End and click Clear Audit Trail.

2. Enter the date you want to clear transactions up to and click Clear audit trail. 

NOTE: This should not be a date within the current financial year.

3. To run a backup click Browse and select the required folder for the backup and click OK, then click OK and click OK.

4. To view the removed transactions click OK then click Close and then click Close again.

When you run a Clear Audit Trail, an opening balance journal is posted to replace the value of your removed transactions.

Now that you’ve completed the Clear Audit Trail, you may want to remove old records, invoices and orders.

Delete records, invoices and orders

You can delete customer, supplier and nominal records if they have no remaining balance, no transactions associated with the account and are not associated with a project.

Deleting a sales order, purchase order, invoice or credit does not delete the relevant audit trail transaction or adjust stock.

To do this:

1. Open the relevant module and select the records you want to delete.

2. Right click and then click Delete. To confirm deletion, click Yes.

Flagging records as inactive

You can also use the Inactive flag in Sage 50 Accounts to hide old and unused customer, supplier, product, nominal or bank records from your record lists without deleting them.

For further information on how to do this, login to our portal and view the guide.

Compress the data

Deleting data and records from Sage 50 Accounts, doesn’t delete the space in the data files.  This can mean that the files may not be the correct size and data could show data incorrectly. To resolve this, you can run the compress data option which will reuse any previous deleted file space.

1. On the menu bar click File then click Maintenance then click Compress Data.

2. Clear the Compress All Data Files check box.

3. Clear the check boxes against the data files you don’t want to compress.
For example, to compress the customer records only, clear all the check boxes except Sales Ledger.

4. Click Compress then click OK, then click Close then click Close.

Further Information

If you have any questions about this or need assistance, then please contact the GCC Group Support Team on 0345 260 1151 or servicedesk@gccgroup.co.uk

Sage 50

Create a more agile, efficient & modern business with Sage 50 Accounts.

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• Sage 50cloud Standard
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Sage 50cloud Accounts gives you the ability to leverage & act upon accurate information – which is at the core of all successful business operations.

Speak to a member of the GCC team and find out more about Sage 50cloud.