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EDUCATION - Consolidation Database to retain prior year data

Having just completed our first year end in Sage for Education we have found a problem that is going to cause us significant reporting issues going forward.

The process for the consolidation year end produces a number of problems.

Firstly the roll up by Accumulated Fund Profit could do with being enhanced to allow you to post to a default nominal and department code. This would allow us to see the fund balances by individual database in the year end TB that is produced. This is essential for reporting to the ESFA.A prior year journal could be used to correct this from the single code out to a departmental split by school.

The above problem however is made much worse when you follow step 6 of the Consolidation - Year End Procedure on the Sage help site.

"Parent: Use Zero Balances to clear all transactions for the parent company reporting company.

This clears all transactions from the parent company. You need to do this to remove the year to date value from your balance sheet nominal accounts.

This clears all transactions from this company database. Do not use this in a subsidiary company school."
The actual result of this process not only removes the year to date values, but it actually removes every single transaction so all prior year data at a consolidated level is totally lost.
This causes a rather large issue for a trust as in May we will be required to resubmit our prior year data to the ESFA as a part of the BFRO return. This is to be done at a trust level, with some data also provided at an individual school level.(https://www.gov.uk/guidance/academies-budget-forecast-return) I would like some assistance on how we can achieve this without having to create an off-line excel based solution that would pull data from each of our databases.
As this package is for the education market, it would be a really good development if it made it easier to complete the returns that have to be submitted to the ESFA as happens on packages offered by Sage competitors in this market.
Nikki Laney

*Community Hub is the new name for Sage City