Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat … and people are rushing about like headless chickens (or possibly turkeys) with too much to do, and no time to do it. So we’re keeping this final newsletter of 2024 brief.
But first, we would like to wish you all a safe and happy festive season, and all the best for 2025. We’d also remind you that we run limited support over the holiday season (see Holiday Support at the end of this newsletter).
In this newsletter:
MoneyWorks 9.2
MoneyWorks 9.2 is now available. This is primarily a maintenance release, and includes reliability and performance enhancements. More particularly it lays the groundwork for more cool stuff in the future.
Note that holders of perpetual licences can only update if their software maintenance is current. For Express and Gold users, there will be a prompt when their software maintenance becomes due, but they may elect not to pay it at that time. When they next attempt to update their software they will have the opportunity to pay any accrued maintenance.
For a complete list of changes, see the MoneyWorks 9.2 change notes.
Holiday Housekeeping
If things are a bit quiet over the holidays, it is a good time to do some MoneyWorks housekeeping.
Check your open periods
Because MoneyWorks largely runs itself, people forget that you do need to manage your periods. Opening periods is normally automatic, but the onus is on you to close them. If you don’t do this, MoneyWorks will refuse to open a new period once there are 90 periods open. So the basic principles of period management are:
- At the end of the financial year, once things are ready to be sent to your accountant for finalising, you should LOCK the previous financial year. This stops people inadvertently entering data into old periods, thus altering what was sent to the accountant.
- Once the adjustments from the accountant have been entered and posted, you should CLOSE that financial year. This will permanently lock the results in, so they cannot be altered in the future.
For more details, see the section on Managing Financial Periods in the MoneyWorks manual.
Purging transactions
Purging will delete completed transactions, and is also covered in the Period Management section of the manual. Historic transactions can be useful, and there is no real need to purge them unless your MoneyWorks data file is getting large (over about 3.5GB). If you do decide to purge, you should keep a backup of the file before purging just in case you ever need to refer to the old transactions.
Check your Bought and Sold transactions
In MoneyWorks Gold/Datacentre, whenever you complete a Purchase or Sales Order, the order is moved into the Bought or Sold section of the transaction list. In the normal course of events, at least one accounting transaction (invoice, payment or receipt) is generated to reflect what happened to the order. Thus the completed orders are just copies of these other transactions, and are only kept in case you need them at some time in the future.
You can delete these completed orders at any time as they have no accounting relevance (and they will not be deleted when you Purge). But they do take up valuable storage space, so need to be managed.
macOS Sequoia Permissions
Over the last few years, macOS has increasingly applied restrictions on what apps can access on your computer. This includes restrictions on access to parts of the filesystem like the Documents folder and the Downloads folder—you will have seen the permissions dialogs plenty of times by now. We have noticed (and you may have too) that the Apple Installer sometimes wants permission to access “your” Documents folder in order to complete the MoneyWorks Datacentre installation. It doesn’t want any such thing (we think it may be to do with the fact that the MoneyWorks server has a “Documents” folder). In any case, always be sure to allow access when updating, otherwise Apple’s installer will fail completely and delete the server app altogether, requiring a re-download of the installer.
New in Sequoia, macOS denies app access to the network until you grant permission. Obviously MoneyWorks Datacentre and the MoneyWorks Gold client need access to the network. Confusingly, Apple refers to this as “permission to find devices on the local network”. It appears that any time you install an OS update, these permissions may get reset and everything stops working. Make sure you click “Allow” on the permission dialog that is shown, otherwise MoneyWorks Gold will not be able to connect to MoneyWorks Datacentre. If network permission has been denied (or networking is otherwise mysteriously not working), go to System Settings → Privacy & Security → Local Network and make sure the switches for MoneyWorks Datacentre Console and/or MoneyWorks Gold, as appropriate, are turned on.
Upcoming Training Courses
We have scheduled training courses on Wednesday 26th February in our Auckland training room. For more details, or to book your place, see cognito.co.nz/support/training/
We can also do targetted on-line training, normally using zoom. If you are interested in organising a one-on-one or group session please email info@cognito.co.nz.
Holiday Support
Most of the MoneyWorks support and admin team will be taking a much needed break over the holiday period, which in this part of the world is summer.
Phone support will be unavailable after 3:00pm on Friday 20th December NZST, and will resume on 6th January. Support will be available by emailing support@cognito.co.nz, but with a longer turn around time than normal.
When emailing for support you should include your Support-ID and PIN (available under Help>Get Support in MoneyWorks 9), and include a description of the issue, as well as what version of MoneyWorks you are on, and the operating system version you are using (e.g. Windows 11, macOS Sequoia 15.2). The more information you provide, the more likely the support team will be able to provide a solution.