With Christmas and New Year just around the corner, we want to take this opportunity to thank our loyal customers, partners and colleagues for your continued support of Sage Business Management Software solutions and services supplied by Chips in 2018.
We wish you and your families good health, great joy and an even better business year in 2019!
Our offices will remain open during normal business hours throughout the holiday period with the exception of the official public holidays being the 25th and 26th December 2018 and 1st January 2019.
Year End Procedures
For those customers whose year end is December we have uploaded guides to the Chips website www.chips.co.zw to guide you through the year end process. Please note that there are different procedures if you use Branch Accounting and these are also available on the website.
Control Account Reconciliation – One of the key checks to make at year end is to ensure the control accounts are balancing to the subsidiary ledgers. Sage Evolution 7.20 has a option that assists you with comparing the General Ledger Control Accounts to the subsidiary ledgers for Inventory , Debtors and Creditors. To find this option you would go to – General Ledger | Transactions | Control Account Reconciliation. We have uploaded notes for using this utility to the customer zone on our website under year end procedures.
Bank Reconciliation – The Bank Reconciliation utility allows you to match the entries as processed in your cashbook, per individual bank account, with the physically received bank statement, for the same General Ledger (GL) bank account. We have uploaded notes explaining this process on Sage Evolution to the customer Zone.
Diagnostic Tool – The Diagnostic Tool is a powerful utility that helps you to identify the exact reason for various posting anomalies as observed in the Sage Evolution company, it consists fundamentally out of the System Information- and the Health Checks components. Just some of the typical queries that this utility should be able to assist with are: Identifying the reason for Ledger vs Sub-ledger discrepancies. For example, the total Receivables Control account balance differs with the total Customers Age Analysis as at a specific period end. Validating company setup configurations. Customer and supplier transaction allocations issues. We again have uploaded a document covering this to our website.
Inventory Valuation and Inventory Control account differences – We have uploaded a trouble shooting guide to the website under yearend procedures to help you diagnose why the Inventory Control and the Inventory Valuation may have differences.
Inventory Valuation by Date Utility – Whenever there are any back dated transactions in the company, the Valuation by Date report should rather not be used and the user should make exclusive use of the Valuation by Date Enquiries utility. This is found under Inventory | Enquiries | Valuation By Date. We have uploaded an explanation of this utility to the customer zone on our website.
Vat Control account and Tax Report – We have uploaded an article that help trouble shoot any differences between the VAT Control account and the Tax Report.
Backups – It is important to retain a master backup at Yearend and this should be retained in duplicate on seperate media for at least the statutory period defined in the tax act. We have published backup procedures on the customer zone of our website.
Should you be unable to access any of these documents please email helpline@pastel.co.zw and we shall send them to you by email.
Sage Evolution 7.20.9 and Sage 200 Evolution V9.10.2
The latest version of Sage Evolution is 7.20.8 if you wish to remain on 7.20 and V9.10.2 if you are on V9.10. For those clients wishing to upgrade onto V9 , we would recommend you wait for V9.20 as its release is imminent.
All Sage Evolution customers who are paid up on their annual renewal are entitled to this at no additional charge.
Customers may download this version themselves from our website under the Customer Zone – Software. Alternately customers may request a CD from our offices.
Customers may carry out upgrade themselves or engage us to assist at our prevailing hourly rates.
We have also uploaded a list of new features in 7.20.8 to the Customer Zone.
Sage Evolution Standard now rebranded Sage 100 Evolution
Sage Evolution Standard has now been rebranded Sage 100 Evolution. We have uploaded details of the new features and a copy of the latest release of Sage 100 Evolution to the customer zone on the website. Sage 100 Evolution is now officially released and Sage Evolution Standard users may upgrade to Sage 100. Again you may download yourselves or request us to send a CD. It should be noted that the previous user band limitation on Sage Standard has been increased from 5 users to 10 users on Sage 100 Evolution.
Sage 200 Evolution 9.20 coming soon
The next major release of Sage 200 Evolution is planned for January 2019 and will be Version 9.20. The major thrust behind 9.20 was to release the modules excluded from 9.10 such as ; Job Costing, Service Manager, Municipal Billing and Advanced Procurement.