Invalid transaction dates within your ledgers can cause the balance of the individual ledger along with the overall owner balance to be incorrect. Most reports within the Tenant File are created by entering a date range. The ledgers, however, take into account all transactions posted within the ledger even if the date was entered incorrectly. For example, if while entering a transaction with a transaction date of 01/01/2018, incorrect data was entered making the ‘date field’ display a date of 01/01/2001, that entry would re-sort in the ledger grid and you may not see the entry yet the balance would be affected.
If you feel that an individual ledger or Owner balance is incorrect, one thing to check would be to see if there were invalid transaction dates entered in your system. Within the program, there is an easy way to view a report showing all transactions by date. This report, called the ‘Trust Report’, can be viewed by clicking into REPORTS > GENERAL REPORTS > TRUST REPORT > Enter a date range and click to ‘Print’ the report to screen. If, for example, you completed a ‘Year End Closing’ through the end of 2017 and you only have transactions showing for 2018, you may choose to create a ‘Trust Report’ with a ‘Starting Date’ of 01/01/0100 and an ending date of 12/31/2017 to determine if by chance there are entries entered prior to 2018.
A few things to note…
If you have transactions in the system prior to the year 1900 by mistake, those transactions will affect the balance but will not show up on your screen. That is why we suggest that the Starting Date on the report be entered as 01/01/0100.
If you are creating this report, please note that the information will include all transactions within the given date range. We suggest that you display the report to screen rather than directly to the printer to prevent a large number of pages to be printed.
If you find that you have transactions in your system with dates that were incorrectly entered, you would need to print that portion of the report and correct your entries. If the dates are prior to the year 1900, you would need to run the Database Maintenance procedure found under FILE > DATABASE MAINTENANCE > CHECK FOR LINK PROBLEMS.
As always, prior to making any major changes to your ledgers, we highly suggest that you make a backup of your main database file called ‘TFDATAFL.MDB’.
Thank you!