Hi koshyckoshy,
If Trade Creditors is showing as ($19k) on the Balance Sheet, the brackets usually mean that account is sitting in a negative balance position as at that date, rather than showing a normal amount owing. In practice, that can happen if there’s been an overpayment, a supplier credit, or a payment posted directly to the Trade Creditors account instead of being matched through the usual bill/payment flow.
The best next step is to run the General Ledger Detail report for that same Trade Creditors account using the same date as the Balance Sheet. That will show the exact transactions behind the figure and usually makes it much easier to spot what caused the balance to appear in brackets.
Regards,
Earl
HUGE help to me. Thank you so much for your answer AND ALSO YOUR ADVICE on how to fix it!!
Early: a further question
Hi koshyckoshy,
That does sound confusing. If those Trade Creditors entries are showing as credits, you generally wouldn’t expect the liability balance to show as a negative figure. If it is, that usually means something on the payables side needs checking rather than the Balance Sheet working as expected.
A good next step is to run the Balance Sheet and the Payables Reconciliation for the same date and compare the Trade Creditors totals. If they don’t line up, it’s worth checking for things like transactions posted straight to the payables control account, money transactions coded there, or timing issues such as future-dated entries. More information here: Receivables, payables or inventory out of balance
Regards,
Earl
I checked every single transaction for the entire year. There were not many. All of them are good. Yet the balance is negative.:
For recording bills the transactions amount to this:
DR: Expense Account
CR: Accounts Payable.
And any payments of bills:
DR Accounts Payable
CR: Cash Account
All entries were done by my accountant, so i highly doubt they posted straight to the payables account. Even if they did the journal entries are all as I have noted above. I looked at the opening balance(s) and this doesn't make any sense to me. I am thinking that it is a bug in the MYOB software, because this happened in 2016................can you think of any other possibility besides what you listed above in that link?
