If the previous advice (see “Accounting policy adjustment”) is not applicable to your company for some reasons, this one is for you.

The problem of making additional entries in closed reporting periods is greatly aggravated by the fact that 1C-based systems, de-facto dominating the Belarusian market, do not track the entry-detailed history of database changes. The only date in the journal of entries is the document date. Alas, the system does not store the date of entering the document in the database. Nor does it store the history of changes in a single entry (in professional literature this is called an "audit trail").

We have developed a technique for creating such trail from a typical, standard 1C database.

The procedure is as follows:

1. Identify the periods with journal entries, probably posted “retroactively” in the periods, closed by the Group. From our experience, the previous months of the current year (especially, the 1st quarter) along with entire previous year are at risk.

2. Generate journals of entries for the relevant periods and compare them with the corresponding documents from previous month (yes, you’ll need them at hand). The comparison is based on “subtracting” the previous report data from the recent report. The following cases are possible:

• The previous journal contains an entry X, amounted to BYN 100, which is missing in the current document (i.e. it was deleted from database). The report will be as follows: Entry X, amount: – 100 BYN (the system tracks the transaction went “off the books”).

• The current journal contains an entry Y, amounted to BYN 150, which is missing in the previous document (i.e. made with a delay). The report will be as follows: Entry Y, amount: 150 BYN (the system tracks that transaction was recorded “on the books”).

• The previous journal had an entry X, amounted to BYN 100, while in the current one the same entry is amounted to BYN 120 (i.e. the amount was overwritten). The report will be as follows: entry X, amount: 20 BYN (20 BYN added).

• In the previous journal there was an entry X1, amounted to BYN 100, while in the current one its dimension has changed from X1 to X2, with equal amount. The report will show the following movements: (1) entry X1, amount: -100 BYN; (2) entry X2, amount: 100 BYN (the system decodes the movement as the removal of the older entry and posting of the new one).

3. Upload the calculated changes between versions in a separate database. Ultimately, we possess the data array, similar to the one in 1C, only additionally “sliced” down by months of physical making / deleting / adjusting the records by the accountant.

4. In the subsequent reporting preparation (for example, reclassification of income and expenses according to the Group’s Chart of Accounts), we only process the array of entries (and their adjustments), that have appeared in 1C database since the previous closing.

Thus, we: (a) gain full control over the changes in database; (b) save labor costs for transformational adjustments.