Hi Mathew,

I see what your saying. The problem is with the stock system of the entity that your looking at in that their method of recording sales and purchases does not accurately record the transactions.

clients however do not go through the trauma of a full stock take lightly so in most cases relying on up to date information from that source is not viable.

I have always found that the delivery note gives the full details of the items delivered and should be your starting point.

You will already know from your studies that you match that to the sales order and invoice. I won't go into the flow of documents as that's just revision stuff.

Anyway, assuming that you are able to build up a clear picture of the goods that the business has received that's half of the battle.

Next step of course is what's happened to those goods and often till rolls are about as much use as a chocolate teapot! In a poorly created system the codes are meaningless to us so how do you relate the sales back to stock?

That's where I find that one needs to talk with the business owner as they seem to think that they can give you a pile of invoices and receipts. You wave a magic wand over it and everything magically falls into place.

It's actually the owner of the business who needs to keep a cash book recording their sales and then we take that, relate it back to the documentation and create a set of books for them.

You may find that giving clients a free copy of VT Cashbook will help them in running their business and help you in that you don't have the nightmare of a couple of plastic bags of unreadable till receipts to try and decode without a key.

Of course, we seldom get clients as soon as they set up a business and if your unlucky enough to get one who turns up with a couple of carrier bags of undecipherable receipts then you need to decide whether to take that client and if you do they need to understand that you will be charging based on time spent and that due to the state of their documentation that will be a lot of time.

They may actually find it cheaper to have the stock take and then you would take the goods that you know that they received, the stock records from the stock take and the total amounts received to give you your starting figures from which hopefully the following year the client would be on top of the business and you would be able to process their books without a stock take.

Fingers crossed I've written what I think that I've written as just been trying to get down what's in my head with a darn house alarm blaring away making it difficult to concentrate on what I'm writing. I'll have another rerad when the alarms stopped and probably rewrite the whole lot!

Hope that there are some pointers in there anyway though.

kind regards,

Shaun.

Thanks Shaun & Bill.

In summary, then:

- If you're lucky (), the client will have some system in place to keep accurate stock records

- If not, then encourage them to do so

- Also, use a combination of Invoices & Delivery notes to piece it all together

- Encourage the client to use a Cashbook to record sales

- When a periodic stock-take is carried out, make any necessary adjustments


Hopefully I've understood it correctly!

That's a great help, thank you both.

Matthew

Shamus wrote:

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Right, I'm off the B&Q to buy a ladder and a 12 lb lump hammer!

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