In terms of Section 40(1)(c) of the Public Finance Management Act, this department must submit annual financial statements to the Auditor-General by 31 May 2005. It is, therefore, necessary to close the Department’s books before 30 April 2005. The envisaged closing date is 15 April 2005. Should a department fail to close its books on time, the National Treasury will force closure. Therefore, an urgent appeal is made to all concerned to take note of the following paragraphs and to ensure that the requirements and responsibilities have been met.

It must be noted that the payment procedure for effecting payments on both BAS and LOGIS has been revised by the Provincial Treasury for the month of March 2005 only. The practice of postdating the payment date on BAS and LOGIS must be discontinued for the month of March 2005. On BAS, the payment date field must be left blank as the system will automatically generate the date on which the payment is authorised. In LOGIS, the date on which the payments is authorised must be inserted in the settlement date field. The reason for the amendment is to ensure that expenditure is reflected on BAS on the day of payment. Postdating must take place again from 01 April 2005. Treasury Circular 9/2005 is attached for further reference.

The processing of payments for March 2005 on BAS and LOGIS should be completed by no later than 18 March 2005. In respect of payments to be incurred after this date and up to 31 March 2005, the following steps must be followed. All offices intending to make further payments for March must submit a daily summary of intended payments before 10:00 to the Directorate: Budget Management (DBM), for attention: Mr P.J. Kitshoff, Room 7-20, Grand Central Towers, indicating the nature of the payment and the allocation, together with a total of the payments for the particular day. After scrutiny of the payments summary, the DBM will inform the applicants by 12:00 whether payment can go ahead or not. The reason for this is to ensure that no unauthorised expenditure is incurred by the WCED which exceeds the vote or any main division. Furthermore, as roll-overs cannot be guaranteed, any payments not paid in the 2004/05 financial year will have to be paid from the 2005/06 budget.

S&T advances do not affect the closing of the financial year and the normal BAS payment run dates will still apply. However, because S&T expenditure is only charged against voted funds once the claim has been processed, it is important that all outstanding claims for the 2004/2005 financial year are processed timeously. Owing to the fact that these claims are processed on PERSAL, they should be submitted by no later than 14 March 2005 in order to be included in the last PERSAL run date on 18 March 2005. Any claims submitted after this date will be charged to the 2005/2006 financial year. In the event of a claim being less than the advance, all differences must be repaid before 31 March 2005.

All offices responsible for issuing BAS receipts must ensure that receipts for March 2005, irrespective of the deposit date, are accounted for in the accounting month March (03) and that all pending receipts have been allocated on BAS.

All petty cash expenditure up to 31 March 2005 must be accounted for during March.

It is imperative that the correct posting date is used on BAS at all times, especially when journal entries i.r.o. corrections for the 2004/2005 financial year are being captured during March. All authorisers must also ensure that journals captured in respect of March 2005 are authorised timeously within their workflows.

All outstanding transactions with a status of open, reject, to be rejected, incompl, tobeact, tobeau and rejauth must be maintained, authorized or cancelled. An outstanding transactions report per functional area (payment, journals, etc.) can be requested on BAS at the reporting function (Other Reports). The responsible users can be identified from this report for the purposes of finalising the outstanding transactions. Alternatively, an Outstanding Transaction Enquiry dialogue can be viewed for the outstanding transactions for the Creditor Management and Creditor Payment function areas.

The responsible officials must ensure that all Bank and Persal interface exceptions are cleared before final closure. The BAS System Controller must ensure that all Persal runs have interfaced with BAS and that the PMG interfaces have taken place.

The Banking section must ensure that all manual payments (NAPS) have been captured on BAS for the 2004/2005 financial year. A bank reconciliation must be compiled for March 2005 so as to balance the bank statement as at 31 March 2005.

In order to classify Assets and Liabilities accounts correctly on the financial statements, it is imperative that the necessary steps are taken to clear these accounts to reflect the correct balances, e.g. credit balances on debt accounts. In the case of investment accounts of special funds, the balances must be reconciled for final statement purposes.

In respect of amounts owing by and to other departments, it is a requirement that certificates of confirmation of amounts outstanding are submitted for audit purposes for each department with whom the WCED has undertaken a transaction. The confirmation letters must be sent out within one month of the year-end (30 April) and returned by no later than 25 May so as to enable departments to disclose the correct balances in their financial statements.

All revenue received for the financial year should be regularly allocated and paid over to the Provincial Revenue Fund.

The preliminary closure of the 2004/2005 financial year, i.e. March 2005, will take place on 15 April 2005. This implies that only BAS users taken on with period opening and closing adjustment functions (Accounts Controller) will be able to process further adjustments (journals) for March 2005 before final closure, which will take place on 3 May 2005. All BAS users are requested to ensure that all necessary adjustments are authorised before the above-mentioned preliminary closing date, i.e. 15 April 2005.