Inactive Bank Accounts – Sage 50 Accounts

There is a great bit of new functionality that has been released with Sage 50 Accounts version 24.
This is the ability to make Bank Accounts and Nominal Codes inactive, just as we can with Suppliers, Customers and Products in earlier versions.
However, we have found a couple of little “quirks” around this, and so thought it would be useful to share this with you.
First thing we found; to be able to mark a Bank Account inactive, the first (not very obvious) thing you will find is that you have to make the account no longer a ratio account.  To do this, you need to go to Nominal Codes, and there is a button along the top menu (along with the Chart of Accounts, Trial Balance etc).  Click on this, find your bank account in the list, highlight it and press ‘Delete’.  Voila!
The second thing we found was when we were having a good old tidy up of some Bank Accounts with one of our customers.  There used to be a ‘Cash Register’ account, but this was no longer being used so it was made Inactive.
The next time a Bank Reconciliation was looked at on the Main Bank Account, it was no longer possible.  Further investigation showed that the tick was in the ‘No Bank Reconciliation’ checkbox, and to make matters worse the box was greyed out and inaccessible.
We went into Settings then Bank Defaults, and saw that the Cash Register had been set to the Main Bank Account.  This again was greyed out, meaning we couldn’t change it back even if we made a new bank account to be the Cash Register.
Fortunately, very little work had been carried out in the meantime which meant we could restore a backup.  However, if this hadn’t been noticed till much further down the line, we would have had to make a new bank account and put any unreconciled transactions from the Main Bank Account into it (start the bank account again).  The other thing that would have made this difficult was that all the transactions in the Bank had been marked as unreconciled, as it couldn’t be reconciled anymore…  This would have meant finding the last statement from the memo tab and working out from that the outstanding transactions from there.
So – lesson learnt – before you make your bank accounts inactive, always check for the Settings > Bank Default tab and check your Cash Register settings!