Debugging Debtors and Creditors Reports
Follow these steps to validate and debug problems with debtors and creditors reports.
- Check that totals of bill/invoice header and line balances match each other.
- If they don't match, find specific transactions that do not match and review the data. The calculation of balance on either the header or the line may be incorrect.
- Run the reconcilation
- Check that the total "Outstanding" amount matches:
- Creditors: The sum of balances on bill headers/lines including -ve balances for credit notes.
- Debtors: The sum of balances on invoice headers/lines including -ve balances for credit notes.
- Check that the total "Outstanding" amount matches:
General Checks
- Ensure that no invoice/bill line is over-paid. Problems can include
- Duplicated allocations
- Migrated data from old systems.
- All funds being allocated to one invoice/bill line which overpays it and skipping allocation to other lines on that invoice/bill is fully paid overall, but the lines are not correctly paid.
- Ensure that the line status of invoices/bills matches the balance owing.
- Ensure that the header status of invoices/bills matches the associated line status values.
- Ensure that unposted transactions don't have any net ledger transactions.
Common Posting Problems (reported as adjustments)
- General Journal (not unposting) that changes the account balance without a corresponding invoice/bill debt
- General Journal with no linked source transaction
- Incorrect accounting group (i.e. posting a deposit to a creditor control account)
- Posting to the control account (Setting the account of bill/invoice lines to the control account)
- Postings that cannot be matched to source transactions
- Transactions including deposits/cheques (not credit notes) with remaining unallocated funds
- Posting to control account other than the control account of the current transaction (impacts balancing of the other account)
- Postings of +ve and -ve amounts for allocation journals to the same (control) account. These should post to different accounts or not be created.