It seems that Microsoft Office Accounting Professional (2007) has a small problem. Actually, I’m not an accountant, so there may be more than one. But in this case, the problem is that once you have moved past the end of a year (here, 2007) and started entering items in a new fiscal year (2008), the accounting package doesn’t want to let you enter any complex journal entries any longer. If you want to enter a single line-item transaction, it’s fine and you don’t even notice it. That’s great, and the way that I prefer to go. But unfortunately, every once in a while, I have to enter something a little more complex, perhaps spanning two accounts on one side of the entry and one on the other. You can do that on a simple one-line transaction.
At that point, you have a problem and you get the message that says “A Voucher No. on the lines may only be used once per fiscal year”. I had actually seen this message before (and I don’t recall what that one was for – it may have been the same thing), but I managed to get around it somehow. At this point, I needed to enter an adjustment for last year, and 2008 is well under way. So I needed to figure a way around it. For those who are asking, Quickbooks isn’t a solution at this point. I am getting there, but it won’t happen in the next couple of days, when I need to have things turned over to the accountant, and that’s when I started digging. The good news is that it’s fixable. The bad news it that you have to do a little work.