I am trying to obtain the Mar 31/09 AR Subledger balance (essentially our outstanding AR at year end per the subledger) for reconciliation to the GL. I have tried a couple of reports but am not sure which one is correct. I have run the Aged Trial Balance using a Calculate as of Date of Mar 31/09 as well as an Aged as of Date of Mar 31/09. I have also ran the customer transaction listing for ALL dates (and all customers) and each report gives me a different answer. And of course, none of them match the GL! Which report do I need to run to get the outstanding AR at Mar 31/09?? What is the difference between "Calculate as of" and "Aged as of" Trial Balance?

Thank you!
Tanja

You use the Aged Trial Balance with the "Calculate as of" option to get the number tha should tie back to the GL. It won't tie back if anyone has made journal entries driectly to this account in Ledger. You can find out if this has happened by creating a source journal or drilling into the transactions and seeing if any of them have a source coude that doesn't start with "AR".

Great, thank you.

Is it true also that if I run a customer transaction listing in AR for all customers and all transaction types for a month, this should be the same as the net change to my control account in the GL for that month? (that seems to be the case but I want to confirm).

Also, when I ran a customer transaction listing (Current and Historical Trans by Date) and selected all transaction types for the fiscal year, the total of this report is different from the change in Aged AR Trial balance from one year end date to the other. I would have expected that the total customer transactions for the period should equal the net change in AR trial balance for the period - any ideas why they would not match?

Specific details:

A - AR trial balance - calculated as of March 31, 2008 = 43,215.17
B - AR trial balance - calculated as of March 31, 2009 = 73468.49
Net change in AR trial balance fiscal 2008/09 (difference between A and B above) = 30,253.32 (increase in AR balance)

Customer Transactions (Current and historical) for all customers and all transaction types from April 1/08 through Mar 31/09 = $-34590.73 (original amount - decrease) and $49371.57 (current amount - increase). I would have expected that the total customer transactions for the period ($-34590.73)should have equalled the change in AR trial balance for that period (30,253.32). Based on the customer transaction totals, it would seem that my AR should have decreased by 34590.73 whereas per the aged TB it actually increased by 30253.32. What am I missing??

Also, am I correct in using the original transaction amount rather than the current amount? My understanding is that the current amount is the amount that is still unapplied, therefore if a transaction was posted as $375, with 100 applied, the original amount is $375 and the current amount is $275 - is that correct?

Thanks! PS..... love the picture!

Hi Cool Aid

To answer the easy questions...

Yes it is true that the customer transaction listing for a month should tie to the net change in the GL control account for the month. The key word here is "should".

The same should be true for the net change between any two period ends, including a whole fiscal year, assuming you are keeping history in AR for that period.

You are correct that the original amount is the amount to use for purposes of this exercise.

Now for the hard question...

Why reality doesn't match theory can be due to a whole slew of reasons. The first thing to check is whether the GL control account balance agrees to the aged trial balance as of the two period ends. If it does, then it should be fairly straightforward to reconcile any differences by exporting both reports to Excel and matching. If it doesn't, user error is the most likely (but not only) cause, and troubleshooting this is beyond the scope of a first reply on this forum.

Steve

Thank you for your response. So what would cause the change in Aged AR Trial Balance from one period to the next to increase but the customer transaction listing to indicate a decrease? I can understand how discrepancies between GL and AR can happen, but am really confused about why there are such discrepancies within AR itself. Are there any quick checks I can do to try to validate either Aged AR balance or customer activity totals?

THanks,
Tanja

In the AR Aged Trial Balance are you using Aged as of or Calculated as of? Ages as of has no cut off. Calculated as of could have an issue when a future dated invoice is paid by a more recent cash receipt.

The list of possible problems is very long as anything and everything an end user could do wrong would have to be considered.

I didn't want to be the only one to say it, but now that Doug has chimed in, I believe your issue is not the kind that experts on this forum can solve. What you need is a second pair of eyes to look at what you are doing and point out where you are going wrong.

This is a situation for an Adagio consultant (who you will have to pay).

Sometimes being told that you need to pay someone to solve your problem and who you need to pay is valuable advice in itself. Don't you just hate paying a plumber to tell you that the leak is a roofing problem.

Steve