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Hi Rachel
Sage will allow this to occur but care is needed. The yearend date can be changed easily if you have a more advanced package, (Sage Professional or Accounts Plus) if you don't have one of these packages you can't do it. The date for the start of the year needs to be changed first, in your case this would now be 01.04.10. Then journals of the transactions in the earlier months ie Oct 2009 to March 2010 need to be journalled into the new year, ie with a date of 01.04.10 & journalled out of the old year 31.03.10. You may prefer to this on a month by month basis but in some ways this would cause more work. As long as you have a reliable backup of the data prior to the yearend change, & printouts of the Nominal Accounts leading to the journal totals entered, you should be ok to enter in one batch. The balance sheet prior to & after the change should be the same, the profit & loss will now be quite different. If things aren't done properly there will be a previous year adj showing in the balance sheet, because, not all transactions have been cleared out of the old & entered in the new correctly.
This will help by only needing to do one yearend. Corporation Tax will require an apportionment of the Profit for the 2 periods into one long & one short, but that can be based on the accounts held on Sage. The depreciation would need to be for the correct length of time, but one set of accruals & prepayments is all that would be needed. One small thing is the budgets on Sage would be non existent as a result of the journals, for Oct 2009 to March 2010 & very heavy for April 2010. The budgets based on previous year records I find really useful, so it would help to adjust the budgets manually by entering the monthly values from your print outs created earlier.
If you don't have Sage Professional of Accounts Plus, you can send the data to sage to do, but I think the cost is about £300, depending on cover etc..
Sage can work with mid month dates, but it can be a bit of a hasstle & again you do need a more advanced package to run transactional trial balances, profit & losses & balance sheets. I would try to use full calender months, but keep a record of the September 2009 transactions which were entered with a date of 01.10.09.
Regards
John.
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