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• # 79187
• Thu 02 Feb 2012 09:58 PM

Hi all,

Could anyone advise me on how I would go about managing accounts for the following scenario:

"I own a retail business that sells products off the shelf in one half of the store, and runs a small cafe in the other half. The two income streams both fall under the same business (and therefore the same accounts for Companies House/HMRC purposes), but for the purposes of financial planning I want to keep the finances for the store and cafe seperate so that I can have a good appreciation of how well (or badly) each income stream is doing (rather than putting all profits, losses, assets etc in the same pot and losing clarity on each element of the business"

What would be the best way of doing this? Would I set up the accounts as two seperate companies and then add everything together at year end (which seems overly complicated and leaves massive scope for error), or create seperate accounts in the ledgers (i.e stock of materials for the Store & stock of materials for the Cafe, Sales for the Store & Sales for the cafe etc)??

I'll be running Sage 50 Accounts Professional.

Any help will be greatly appreciated

A



 

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• # 79189
• Thu 02 Feb 2012 10:04 PM

Hi

I'd set up Sage with separate 5000 range product specific purchases codes for each side of the business and separate 4000 range sales codes, and then the accounts don't have to be kept separate and can all come under the same umbrella.  General purpose things like rent, rates, heat and light and stationery for example will support both sides of the business anyway.

That's how I'd do it . Hope that helps! 

• Debbie
  www.beckcottage.com
  
  

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• # 79193
• Thu 02 Feb 2012 11:05 PM

What about using departments on Sage?

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• # 79194
• Thu 02 Feb 2012 11:16 PM

Hi

This is just my thoughts .  I think you may be making your life very difficult.    As they will be costs that are shared and hard to divide

You said you are using Sage Professional .   So you should really be using the Project Costing Module  and Departments as well as the nominal structure.

 Also with the Project costing you can bring in costs in the form of charges and credits for each project that do not change the accounts , but are a true cost of that project.  For example loads of Directors and business owners do loads of hours with out pay,  So for example if in the future you want to see the real cost you can do a CD .  It is like a database within the accounts , it is excellent. 

I use this for about 5 of my clients.


I do accounts for many business like yours and the best thing to do is .

1  As mention above  about 5000 code . I would also  clearly match your Sales 4000 codes with their exact counter part of the 5000 codes.

2) Set up two different departments with the Company modiules under Links on the left side  .

3) Set up two different   Projects for the two business you can also put budgets in . (This is within your PROJECT MODUles which show you the profits or losses for each side of the business.  

No matter what you enter in Sage it asks you for a Dept code and Project code and Cost code .

If you do not like the default costs codes you can change them in configuration.  

You can run a transactional P & L and balance sheet also for how many departments you want. 




Edited at 02 Feb 2012 11:19 PM GMT

• Sarah Douglas C.FICB

  HouseTree Business Ltd 

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• # 79285
• Sun 05 Feb 2012 09:17 AM

Thank you all for your comments - I'm just getting to grips with Sage, so hopefully that should all make sense to me in the not too distant future!!

Appreciate the help

A 

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