One of the new features in Sage 50 2018 is the ability to add a column for “cleared date” to the check register and cash disbursement journal reports. Adding the column is simple, just click the Columns button when viewing either report, scroll down to the end of the list of available column and check the Show box next to Cleared Date. You can use the Move Up and Move Down buttons to change the column order if you don’t want Cleared Date to be the last column on your report. Click OK to see your new report. If you want the new column to always appear on your check register (or cash disbursement journal) click the Save button and give the report a new name. You new report will show up in the Accounts Payable report list with a blue wrench on the icon, indicating it is a custom report. The original report will still be on the list too.
If you’re interested in having this information on your reports, then it’s important to understand where the date comes from. The date that Sage 50 reports as the cleared date will be the statement ending date from the account reconciliation at the time the transaction was marked cleared. That means that if you reconcile monthly, all of the payments will have the same cleared date (the statement ending date). If you reconcile more frequently, such as daily or weekly, AND you set the Statement Ending Date field in the account reconciliation to the date you are reconciling as of, then that date will be stored as the cleared date for the payments marked as cleared during that session. If one of those transactions gets un-cleared and re-cleared on a later daily/weekly reconciliation, the cleared date will be updated to the new statement ending date.
As a final experiment, I tried reconciling by importing a QFX file downloaded from my bank, hoping that Sage 50 would use the cleared dates from that file, but it didn’t. The cleared date still got set to the statement ending date.
