[stephanetaieb]

any ideas on how I would deal with balancing a balance sheet that is not balancing? i wanted to make a journal entry but netsuite doesn’t let you make a journal entry that is not balancing… any ideas anyone?
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[bboese]

RE: Balance Sheet not balancing

Try this, as appended below, and further discussion at:

https://usergroup.netsuite.com/users…erence+balance

Originally posted by bboese

Try this:

a) go to Home>Set Preferences>Reporting/Search

b) if you have Accounting Periods turned on, a Report by Period field should show on this screen.

c) this may be set to Financials Only or All Reports. Change this user preference to Never

If this does not help, please provide more details.

By the way, this change above could help in other areas too. For example, if you drill down on financial numbers from your Key Performance Indicators portlet, and find a different total amount on that report – in other words, it does not appear to reconcile / balance – this may also help to show more consistent dollar amounts between different reports.

[Dan Bovarnick]

RE: Balance Sheet not balancing

I’ve not been able to find a case where NetSuite allows an unbalanced entry. The most likely cause is an asset/liability/equity account that has been added to your chart of accounts has not been added to the appropriate spot on your balance sheet.

Do a thorough check of all your balance sheet account from the chart of accounts and make sure they are set to appear on the balance sheet.

[stephanetaieb]

RE: Balance Sheet not balancing

If i turn on accounting periods what does it do?

[Nick Horowitz]

multiple issues going on here…so let me give you some background…

First of all, there is the setup option to use Accounting Periods. You don’t have to use periods. If you don’t use periods, then NS uses the tran date to determine the month/year for I/S and B/S. If you have periods turned on, the NS uses the period or the tran date depending upon your user preference (see below). If you have periods activated, then all txns will have an additional dropdown field appear called “period” with a drop down menu for you to pick the accounting period. It will default to the period containing today’s date, but you can change it.

Warning: if you use periods, you have to MANUALLY open a new set of future periods each new year, or else no one can pick the new period in January when the calendar rolls over; worse yet, NS will default to the last open period, which is December! If your employees don’t catch this they will blissfully enter a ton of transactions the first week of January in the wrong period (December) which you then have to go fix!

Now, if you haven’t been using periods, but then go to turn them on, NS runs a bulk update program on your dataset and populates the period field with the period based upon the transaction date. Sometimes this doesn’t work properly, so you actually have txns with a BLANK period. Or, you may not have opened all the required periods, and then NS stuffs the transaction in a wrong period. These will cause out-of-balance conditions. You can run a Saved Transaction Search and look for txns where Period = Blank. This will make sure your period field is clean in your entire dataset.

Now, while you are using periods, you can legally use a tran date that does NOT match with the period. For example, you may be using a tran date of Aug 5, 2008 on a Bill in A/P, yet have it posted into the July 2008 period. This is perfectly legal, and is GAAP compliant.

Now, here’s the kicker: there is a setting on every user’s preferences called “Report by Date” or “Report by Period”. You have to make sure that every use sets his/her preference to the correct method, or you’ll have different people receiving inconsistent reports!!!

In the above example of the Bill dated Aug 5, 2008 but with the period of July 2008: if you run an Income Stmt with “Report by Period”, that Bill will show as an expense in July. If you run an Income Stmt with “Report by Date”, that Bill will show as an expense in August.

More likely is the vice-versa situation, where you’ve closed a particular previous period but then you have a Bill come in late. For example, August 2008 period is closed already, but now a Bill arrives on Sept 23rd, 2008 that is really for August expenses. You’ve closed the earlier periods, but you have NOT locked the tran date (meaning NS will let you put any tran date, but you can only pick Sept 2008 as the period). So in this case you may put the tran date of Aug. 31, 2008 (to reflect that Bill correctly in the prior period) yet put the period to Sept 2008 which is your current open period. Now if you run your I/S “By Tran Date” yet filter it for Period = Sept 2008, you’ll get an I/S stmt that shows you the old straggler Bills in the earlier months, and all the current bills in Sept column–so this helps you see which Bills are actually from a prior period.

Hopefully this clarifies this for you.

Another place that can cause out-of-balance is if you have restrictions on txns to only allow certain dept’s or certain employees to view only certain txns, then those restrictions apply to running reports, too! So the restricted transactions are excluded, thus causing an out-of-balance B/S when the employee runs the report (but of course the Admin should be wide-open and should balance)

Another place can be when you added a new acct to the chart of accounts, that you did NOT properly map that account to show on the B/S or I/S. So when you run the report, that acct is missing (see other users post below on this problem). NS is supposed to default newly created accounts, but it doesn’t always work correctly, so double-check every account in the COA to make sure it is mapped correctly.

[Puckman]

RE: Balance Sheet not balancing

I have seen this before ….

I suggest you look closely at Nick’s last point …

Go into each Balance Sheet Account (Lists > Accounting > Accounts) and make sure that each account is configured to show on the Balance Sheet.

This was the source of my “un-balanced” Balance Sheet.

[Alex Murphy]

RE: Balance Sheet not balancing

We are experiencing the same problem and have logged a trouble ticket 756751-

There are discrepancies from the reports being run on a Calendar basis and by the Accounting Period. These are not attributable to entries being posted in Aug that relate to July, these are random differences for prior periods in several accounts that are now out of balance. Detailed balances are not tying to summary- Seems more like a corrupt database issue-

The Balance Sheet run by the Accounting period is not balancing.

I see the explanation above and the temporary work around, but I don’t understand why the two should be in synch unless you have.

Any one else have the same issue?

Alex Murphy

Accruent, Inc

[Nick Horowitz]

You have a couple of renegade transactions that either have (1) a blank Accounting Period, or (2) the Accounting Period is a different month/year than the tran date.

For (1), you can run a Saved Transaction Search and search for criteria where Accounting Period = blank. That will find any txns where the Account Period is blank. Edit those transactions and make sure the Accounting Period is selected in the drop-down menu. Filter for mainline = true also so you’ll only get 1 row per tranaction.

Fixing (2) is more complicated. You’ll have to do a Saved Transaction Search of just the InternalID, Accounting Period, and Tran Date. The InternalID is the id# that shows up in the URL when you edit a transaction. This is a unique id so you can pull up that txn later for editing. Export this to Excel. Then you’ll have to write a formula in Excel to calculate the Month & Year from the tran date, then compare that to the Accounting Period value and show you any mismatches. Those would be the source of your discrepancy. Again filter for mainline = true and you’ll only get 1 row for each transaction (otherwise your Excel export will be huge!)

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