by Edward James

Created on: May 03, 2010

It should be stressed that Sage Accounts Production Advanced ("SAPA") is not a book keeping software package. It is not used to maintain accounting records, preparing VAT returns or preparing payroll. Whilst it is possible to link it to other Sage products it is essentially a standalone piece of software.

SAPA is an excellent piece of software that is designed to prepare year end statutory financial accounts for filing with Companies House.

SAPA is primarily designed for the preparation of company accounts, although it can be used for sole traders and partnerships as well. This makes it a very versatile program.

SAPA is aimed at firms of accountants that prepare the year end accounts for a number of different companies and businesses since it is possible to set up hundreds of clients. Single companies that decide to prepare their own year end accounts will not benefit from SAPA as the cost (and training required) will not outweigh the benefits of having the software and it would be more cost effective to prepare the year end accounts on word or pay a firm of accountants.

Group companies may benefit from using SAPA in order to prepare the individual accounts for all the single companies in that group, although it is a very technical program and extensive training and daily exposure is required in order to use it efficiently.

In essence there are two elements to preparing a set of accounts on SAPA. The first is posting the trial balance and the second is preparing the notes and disclosures.

i) Posting the trial balance

The trial balance can be prepared manually on a spreadsheet package, as excel, or it can be extracted straight from many accounting packages, such as Sage 50 Accounts (which I have also reviewed). It should be noted that it is not possible to extract a trial balance from SAPA since it is not book keeping software.

It is possible to link SAPA to Sage 50 accounts, or other Sage bookkeeping products, hence eliminating the need to re-input the figures. However, there have been issues with the linking process and unless both programs are set up 100% accurately problems will be encountered and it is quicker just to manually key in figures.

A copy of the trial balance is printed off and coded up. Balance sheet items use numbers 1 - 999 and the profit and loss items use numbers 1,000 - 9,999.

Once the trial been coded up it is simply a case of typing the numbers in to the "enter trial balance" section of SAPA. To ensure that the trial balance has been

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