Federal and Provincial Governments and even the major
Banks are implementing a series of changes that all come into effect in 2006.
Mandatory data retention has become law for most levels
of Government. While companies have always retained paperwork for a period of
seven or more years, it is now necessary to retain electronic records for an
equivalent period of time. This needs to be done for a number of accounting
modules, including:
1)
Payroll
2)
General Ledger
3)
Accounts Payable
4)
Accounts
Receivable
5)
Inventory Control
6)
Property
Management
Fortunately, this is a simple matter to accomplish
before running the Year-End Closings. In Payroll, the creation of a prior
year’s database is automatic. In the other modules this requires the use of
Libra’s Database Management Utility to create a new database from an existing
one. This can also save you considerable grief should the closing fail to
complete normally. In such cases we can copy last years data to reverse the
failed closing and just start over. When utilizing this utility you must
provide a database to copy from and one to copy to. Only three digits are
permitted in this procedure so we would recommend using abbreviated numbers to
represent fiscal years as illustrated in the following example.
Database to Copy From: GLD001
Database to Copy To
: GLD205
In the above example 2005 data would be accessed from
database 205 and database 001 would be closed to drop prior year data. This
needs to be repeated for AP, AR, etc. Other forms of backup are recommended for
off-site storage as well. Tapes, CD’s and DVD’s make for inexpensive off-site
backups and can in many cases retain the full 7 years of data in a single
easily accessible location.
Most of the major banks are advocating a new standard
cheque file layout to commence the end of the year in 2006. While it is yet unclear
as to how they will enforce this standard it is speculated that any cheques in
2007 that do not meet the new standard may be penalized by higher service
charges. In either case, if you are ordering new cheques make sure that they
meet the new standard. One of the noticeable differences in the new cheque
layout is that the date must appear in the following format with the
designation appearing below the date:
01
15 2006
mm
dd yyyy
The Cheque Number, Cheque Date, Payee Name and Cheque
Amount must also appear in specific zones to allow for new electronic clearing
equipment. In conjunction with these
changes, many banks are offering Positive Pay Systems whereby you can transmit
the details of cheques issued to the bank. Any cheque that lacks the matching
data transmitted to the bank will not be cleared. These features are meant to
combat the increasing occurrences of cheque fraud and reduce the cost of
automated cheque clearing equipment at the same time since one type of device
will work for all of the major banks.
If you are ordering new cheques, try to get a sample to
us in advance to make the necessary one-time program changes. These changes
only affect the layout of the cheque itself so cheque stubs may be left as
is. This may be a good time to convert
your cheques to HP Compatible Laser at the same time.