South Africa: IRP5 reminder

Just a quick reminder to the South African employees and employers:
IRP5 certificates are due within 60 days after the tax year end. Therefore it means that your employer must furnish you as employee with your IRP5 certificate by the 29th of April.

References:
-Paragraph 13(2) of the 4th Schedule of the Income Tax Act no 58 of 1962 (as amended)
-http://www.sars.gov.za/home.asp?pid=3786

Two links

This is a short post regarding two interesting things are read recently:

Changing a CaseWare client-file name

If you are like me and hate it when the name of a file/folder is wrong or deceiving you are in luck that it is possible to change it. It isn't however as easy as you would like it to be.

Essentially you have to create a new CaseWare client file. Here is how you do it:

1. Open the client file of which you want to change the name.
2. File > Copy components (Named copy template in CaseWare Working Papers 2010)
3. Select the "Copy into a new file" option.
4. Enter the new correct client file name
5. Make sure that the "All components" radio button is selected.
6. Next, Next, Finish.

Note the above procedure might differ slightly with CaseWare Working Papers 2010.

The above info was obtained from http://www.caseware.com/support/caseknowledge/renaming-a-client-file.


Informative blog - Nicolaas van Wyk
When researching ISRE 2400 and Independent Reviews I happended upon a really informative blog. The information contained in his blog mostly pertains to the South African legislative environment relating to audit, tax and recent company law changes.

The blog is maintained by the Technical Support Executive of ACCA (South Africa), which is comforting to know that it contains quality information.

You can access Nicolaas van Wyk's blog here at http://nicolaasvanwyk.wordpress.com/.

CaseWare builder mode / Enable special features

This is going to be similar to the previous post, except the following method allows one to enable the special features on the financial statements or enter "Builder mode".

NOTE: This might be very specific to my firm's provider of CaseWare templates!

In the uncompressed CaseWare client folder (default is C:\Program Files\CaseWare\Data\$Client$\) there is a file with the following name of "$Client$CV.dbf". Replace $Client$ with what your target caseware file is called.

Please remember to backup all files before editing them!
Open the "$Client$CV.dbf" with a competent text editor (I suggest notepad++) and search for the first occurrence of "CONSULTING" (it should appear only once in the file). To the right of "CONSULTING" there should be some white space (approximately 12 spaces) and then two capital letters and a number (either 0 or a 1).
Here is what it should look like (I added the italics and bold):

CONSULTING            NN0

The two letters in italics might differ with yours, which is expected.
The single number in bold is what we will change. Change this to "1" so that the portion of the text looks like this:

CONSULTING            NN1

Save the file and reopen your financial statements. Now the extra options should be available.

Hope this aides in the formatting of your CaseWare financial statements!

Death to Apostrophes (remove leading apostrophes from active excel sheet)

For those who has had the pleasure of working with accounting software which doesn't correctly create exports to excel, here is a tip to get rid of the irritating leading apostrophe in the cells which forces them to text.
Yes Pastel Accounting, I am looking at you!

It is a small macro which removes ALL the leading apostrophes from the current active sheet.

Sub DeathToApostrophe()
   'Removes the apostrophe at the start of each cell which forces the content to be text
   Dim s As Range
   For Each s In ActiveSheet.UsedRange
      If s.HasFormula = False Then
      s.Value = Trim(s.Text)
   End If
   Next s
End Sub

Note: This was copied and edited from the macro created by this guy (Zack Barresse). If you are unsure as to how to use the above macro, follow the previous link for more information.

Note regarding dates:
Take care with regards to dates which excel automatically recognises and converts to a DATE formate. Sometimes excel converts it to the incorrect date format, creating extra work for you if you notice it, or leads to error if you don't.

For example: I exported journals from Pastel accounting, and the date format for the specific company file was set to dd/mm/yyyy. I ran the DeathToApostrophe macro and excel recognised and converted the dates to a mm/dd/yyyy format where possible. I attempted in vain to adjust my regional settings in Windows and Excel to correct this behavior, but nothing worked.

The solution was to change the date format used by Pastel accounting to my regional settings (yyyy/mm/dd). In Pastel accounting the date format is company specific and can be changed through the following menu items: Setup > Company parameters > Formats (tab) > Date Entry Format (section).

I might be necessary to similarly change the way the source formats its dates to prevent errors when removing the apostrophes in excel.

Pastel 2011 user password encryption

Do you have a pastel file that is password protected and you don't have the password?

Note: Make a backup before attempting the following.
*The following was tested on Pastel 2011, but is likely to work for other versions as well.

Pastel accounting software makes use of the Pervasive SQL database to store all the accounting data. Open the Pervasive.SQL Control Center (there should be a start menu entry). In Pervasive.SQL Control Center open the "AccountUser" table (follow the tree structure from Engines > $Computername$ > Databases > $Pastel database$ > Tables > AccountUser). If the database you are looking for isn't listed, then add a new database and pointing the location to the folder with your Pastel company's data in.

Now that the "AccountUser" table is open you will see the following fields: Password; ID; Description; AccessTable; ...

The Password field is an Char(8) encrypted using a caesar cipher shifted 18 places to the right on the ASCII table. eg. An encrypted password "twwRRRRR" is actually "bee". Note that the empty spaces of the field are denoted with the character "R".

If you wish to clear the password for a specific user, change the user's password field to "RRRRRRRR".

If you wish to decrypt the password, I find it best to copy the password into a HEX editor, subtract 12 (Hex) from each CHAR and convert the result back to ASCII to obtain the original password.
To edit the password is the opposite of the decryption.

Yey for awesome Pastel security features! Why do they store the actual password, when using hashes for password verification is standard good practice? Why implement a password feature when the data it protects isn't even encrypted (we are able to view/edit the data directly through the Pervasive.SQL Control Center or other applications, eg. Excel making use of ODBC, but more on that later).

So much for trying to keep your confidential Pastel accounting records confidential.