AP Out of Balances

Objective: Identifying and correcting AP out of Balances

Accounts Payable information will only be relevant to associations set to Accrual A/P. These settings can be reviewed in the Association List by adding the columns for A/P Cash. The results will be True or false. True means Cash A/P while False means Accrual A/P.

Example: Accrual Accounting Method and Accrual A/P. The additional columns can be seen in the background while the edit screen is in the foreground.

Financial outs will be identified on the Financial Summary screen or when you compare reports against the Balance Sheet. If you see an outage on the Financial Summary screen, start by refreshing that period and the period prior to confirming which period contains the root issue. 

In this case, there appear to be two different out. Common causes are A/P Audit screen changes causing invoices to be recorded as being paid in a period before the expense exists or GL entries made to the A/P code in error. Both are incorporated into the below example.

The easiest way to troubleshoot is to narrow down the day the out occurred by comparing your A/P Report against the Balance Sheet and identifying which day they no longer match.

The image above shows matching amounts while the below image, on the next day, shows a difference, the same amount of our financial out in December.

From here, using the GL Trial Balance By Groups Report or the Accounting > GL Research will help you narrow down what items may have been an issue.

The above is filtered from 12/1/2018-12/1/2018 and is only displaying the A/P GL Code. Here we see in the description that an invoice from Testy Testerson was the only activity on this day. We're also given a description on the invoice. These, along with the dollar amount, should be enough to find the invoice. If none of this helps, the most unique identifier is your XN# (Action Item Number) tied to this action. This is a column that can be added to both the GL Research Screen and the Service Provider > Invoice screen.

If you had more data within your 1-day range you would rule out non-issues by expanding your date range, adding the column for XN, filtering by XN, and making sure each item washed through A/P.

Initially, we see nothing wrong. This invoice hasn't even been reclassed. To get more detail, work through the Messages and Audit tabs. The Messages tab will show you the flow of the action item in a more digestible way. For example, it might be easier to spot two payments being paid from an invoice after the original payment was unvoided in error. The A/P Audit screen, on the other hand, is more data-focused. 

Highlighted are Red Flags. Since the invoice wasn't reclassed but has a last modified date, the invoice was edited from the Audit screen. In this case, the expense date was moved to a later period than the payment. This is a financial out because an invoice should never be paid before being expensed and this one happened to cross months. To correct, edit the expense to exist in the same month as the payment.

Following the same process for the other Financial Out, we'll find a Bad Journal entry. The easiest way to search GL entries is to search by the code you're looking for activity in.

Notice the GL Code Column contains a filter and the description for the entry is "Accrue Electric Expense". From here you can see that Accounts Payable and Accrued Expense are easily mistaken with similar codes and their names sharing the same beginning letters. In this example, the wrong code was selected and can be corrected by editing and updating.