Account books stolen

When you say "account books" are you talking about the Evrite/Simplex variety of handwritten 52 week books?

They will produce VAT returns but not accounts, have you got a copy of the accounts sitting on a computer somewhere?

Do people still really keep manual "books of account"? It must involve a huge amount of effort compared with simply putting your invoices & bills into something like "quickbooks". (As well as a risk of loosing them!)

Yes that's the one - Evrite 707 "Weekly Accounts Book - ruled for VAT". That's the only a/c book I keep. I simply extract the appropriate totals to complete my annual self-assessment. Nothing kept on computer.

It surely would be on the safe side to inform them all.

Do you need to inform VAT/Tax office if you keep totally computerised accounts?

I would have thought that the risk of losing accounting data kept only on computer is rather higher than the risk of losing the same data kept only on paper. Far too many people are blissfully unaware of how important it is to keep backup copies of computer data. Irrecoverable computer crashes tend to happen more often than, say, fires which consume paper records.

Oh, and let's not forget that fires have not been unknown to cause damage to backup tapes/CDs either, so it makes sense to keep several backup copies *in different locations*.

Do you reconcile the Cash and Bank sections?

I have never seen those sections reconciled because anyone who realised the Cash and Bank Account needed reconciling would see at a glance that the Evrite/Simplex system is the most hopeless method of keeping records that exists. You'd have been better off listing the transactions on a piece of paper, you'd have saved £22 and at least you'd have totals to work from.

People who don't reconcile invariably create errors.

Nope.

| I have never seen those sections reconciled because anyone who | realised the Cash and Bank Account needed reconciling would see at a | glance that the Evrite/Simplex system is the most hopeless method of | keeping records that exists.

Suits my style then!

Anyway, suppose I'd better inform them all.

cheers truman ..........

What is the Evrite/Simplex system? If it's anything like what I used to use since 1982 when I took over treasurership of my church, before I computerised the accounts in 1989, which was done on ordinary multi-column analysis books (if you don't recognise that archaic technical term, just think of them as spreadsheets, but instead of being stored in a computer and displayed on a screen, they're stored AND displayed on -wait for it- real paper), then there is a foolproof method of keeping the books reconciled with the bank.

It involves delaying writing up the monthly entries until the monthly bank statement arrives, and then arranging the book rows in the same order as the entries on the bank statement. Naturally, for this system to work properly, you really must have no Petty Cash AT ALL, so that EVERYTHING in the books corresponds to something on the bank statement. The closest you get to petty cash is that someone pays for petty purchases out of their own pocket and is then reimbursed by church cheque.

Indeed, I've spoken before of those lovely blue or red ledger kept immaculately by Mrs Smith who had never been taught book-keeping but who had stumbled upon the perfect method using her common-sense. She ruled off and totalled the Cash Book then reconciled the Bank Account every month, and every month she worried about the 0.46p difference she'd been carrying forward since 1982 and wasn't sure if Mr Smith would be cross about it or whether she could write it off.

Producing the accounts was simplicity itself, all you had to do was post or summarise the 12 months and that was just about it.

Then there's the Evrite/Simplex system.

There are 52 (or 53) 2 page weekly spreads. On the left side Sales, Bank and Cash columns are juxtaposed as if they are all the same thing. On the right hand side at the top Purchases are listed, Bank column, Cash column, VAT column, then further down are a few token expense headings, Motor Expenses, Heat and Light, and so on.

The weekly totals can be c/fwd to the back of the book to produce quarterly VAT returns summaries, which isn't too bad, but there are no totals for (say) Motor Expenses, Telephone. There is (typically) no Bank Balance to agree to because the little reconciliation panels lie unused, so the first thing you have to do is tick the entire bank account up and look for the twelve errors, Cash in the Bank column and other suchlike inevitable slips of the pen.

Luckily for the OP it would nearly always be quicker to throw the book away and start again.

Why draw attention to yourself? Notify the police because you should always notify the police when something is stolen from you, then if you get a VAT or Tax Inspection you can deal with it when it arises, probably it never will.

I am mystified as to how you could produce your accounts (ie work out what profit you made) directly from the Evrite book?

Yes, I designed my own accounts system (for my 2 person Ltd. company) to run on a database on my computer on basically these lines. The main 'ledger' is the bank ledger which I reconcile with my bank statements every quarter (when I do the VAT return), there are then separate accounts for cash and credit card transactions. The credit card one is reconciled with credit card statements, the cash doesn't have to reconcile with anything really.

Since it's on a database and I do classify all entries by type I can do quite detailed analysis with little effort.

It doesn't have complex audit trails or anything like that but since I'm the only user that hardly matters.

Perhaps the intention is that they are indeed the same thing, in the sense that these particular bank and cash columns were to be used only for sales, i.e. cash+bank=sales.

That seems fine as it mirrors the sales side, again *these* bank+cash columns would equal the purchases column.

Ah, now here's a problem. No VAT column for sales?

With their own bank/cash/VAT columns?

Yes, well, don't you just put the whole week's cheques-in in a drawer, and pay them in as one batch at the end of the week (or beginning of the next)? Then, reconciliation of bank credits with the sales bank column is trivial, even allowing for having to pay in some cash.

And as for cheques-out, this should be easy too, as you would tend to have one cheque per book entry, so they're easy to identify.

I must be misunderstanding your description if I can't see a problem where you apparently do.

| | I am mystified as to how you could produce your accounts (ie work out | what profit you made) directly from the Evrite book?

I add up my receipts then subtract my payments.