There are many methods for reducing input errors in your online accounting file. Accountants use many tricks and work processes to ensure accuracy. Learning about some of these and adopting them in your accounting routine is a good investment in time that will reward you for many years to come. Some of these methods are discussed below, however there are many more:

Basic review of your transaction listings

As you create transactions they will appear in your transaction list for the date period applicable. The process is usually to “add” a new transaction to the list, “save and close” the transaction and then check the transaction for correctness. You cannot check all the detail for transaction but the main items such as Date, Amount and Contact can be verified. This is the most basic and quickest, but least thorough, of checks you can do.

Review of your Categorised Summary report

This is a good report for checking you have used correct tax codes and ensuring you have chosen the correct transaction category for you transactions. You might scan the report to ensure that (for example) all your sales appearing in a transaction category for “Income: light fittings” would have the same tax code. You might also check that there aren’t any stray transactions in this category that shouldn’t be there.

Use the duplicate function for adding transactions

When you use the Duplicate button on any Add/Edit Transaction screen you are creating an exact copy of the transaction you are viewing with a few fields cleared like the Date for example. This helps produce consistency in your transaction adding over time as you will be using the same transaction categories, tax codes, summary information and so on as you are duplicating the information not entering it.

Use the Categorised Summary report to help in adding transactions

A good example of this is when you have regular periodical payments you make for things such as subscriptions, rent, bank fees that are often the same each month except for the transaction date.

1. Load the Categorised Summary report for the previous month (or period) and click on the transaction you want to duplicate in the new month.
2. When the transactions loads you can then click on the duplicate button and the new transaction will load.
3. Then you can include the date for this new transaction and amend any other differences (eg. Summary..”Jul02 rent” to “Aug02 Rent”) and then save the transaction.
4. You will then be viewing the Categorised Summary report again where you can then repeat the process until all your regular payments have been entered.

Use the Transaction Lists to help in adding transactions

As in the above example you can create a list of transaction for the previous month (or period). Use the same process to create new transactions for the new month (or period).

Additional

Make sure you have paperwork, invoices, and bank statements to back up you data entry. Just assuming these things will happen each month (or period) doesn’t mean they actually do!