Need some help with possible data inconsistency

Hi Everyone :),

First time here so please go easy on me.

I am in charge of IT at this institute and yesterday my CFO called me and said that the accountants told her about a wrong entry that has been made couple of years back (3).

the entry is to the tune of $209,000

During that time we we were running simply accounting 2006.

we did do an upgrade and currently running sage 50 quantum 2018.

The accountants were kind enough to blame IT and say...it was because of data corruption.

I am completely lost over here trying to figure out how the consistent updates i did from 2006 version to 2018...that is i made sure all the database was migrated properly, with the sage tool.

I also checked for consistency. everything checked out. 

I do have a back up clone from the time before the update.

my question here is, does the accusation of data corruption hold and valid point ?

or could it have just been a mistaken entry ( like $209,000 instead of $209)? 

or could the zeroes could have been added during the database update?

Is there anyway to fix this ? apparently they ( accountants) tried fixing it and it wouldn't let them ( no idea what this means). 

from and IT point of view..I understand data corruption can happen during migrations, but that is why we always have back ups and clones. 

also, i don't believe data corruption can add extra zeroes ? please feel free to correct me if i am wrong. 

warm regards

v

  • 0

    Hi Irh/v:

    I am not sure exactly what you mean. Do you mean the ledger is out of balance? Data Integrity out of balance? An entry is missing for $209k 3 years ago? Data corruption meaning when it was upgraded through the various editions to Sage 2018 it did not carry forward the correct balances?

    Answer these questions! When you run a trial balance do the debits equal the credits? When you run a data integrity check are any modules not in balance? If so, what are they? Which entry did the accountants' try to do but were unable to do so? Are the balances of the subsidiary accounts receivable, accounts payable and payroll in balance? I may be able to narrow down your issue with these questions answered. Follow up with some more detail!

  • 0 in reply to Agate

    Dear Agate,

    Thank you for tht fast! reply.

    what i mean't by $209k is that there is an excess of 200k in that business, as per simply accounting. which is not true. 

    This led us to believe that it could've been a mistype or a something that changed in the software during the upgrades from 2006 to 2018, that changed the formulations or the way calculations work. 

    I have forwarded your questions to my CFO will get back to you once i receive a reply. 

    Apologies I am just the guy who does Hardware implementations, Training and Support. 

    I am not very good at Simply. 

  • 0 in reply to lrh

    Sage 50 / Simply Accounting is a database, and it actually stores entries in double-entry fashion, just like a paper-and-ink ledger.

    A Journal Entry is stored as a header (date, reference, whodunnit, etc.) + detail lines (account, amount, notes, etc.)

    Each financial year is added up and stored as a list of accounts and opening & closing balances just like a paper Trial Balance. 

    Data corruption is a pretty broad term, it's possible to have wrong data because the application more or less wrote down the wrong number or put it in the wrong place, or for the storage media (hard disk) to fail and (literally) for bits to change. 

    But it's fairly unlikely - usually wrong output is caused by wrong input.