Sage 50 message: "Cannot get journal entry totals for This Year or Last Year
Sage 50 could not add up your journal entries for the current or prior fiscal year, usually during a report, export, or data conversion.
The message “Cannot get journal entry totals for This Year or Last Year in this method.” means Sage 50 was asked to add up your journal entries for the current fiscal year or the prior one, and the routine it used could not produce those totals. Despite the wording, it is not a complaint about a journal entry you typed, and nothing in it identifies a bad transaction. It reports a failed calculation. The word “method” refers to the internal route the program, or a tool connected to it, used to fetch the numbers, and that route could not answer the request.
Step 1: note exactly what you were doing
The trigger matters more than the text. This message typically appears in one of three situations: generating or refreshing a report or financial statement that compares this year against last year; running an export, an archive, or a third-party add-on that reads your data; or running a conversion that pulls Sage 50 data into another accounting system. Write down which one it was before changing anything. If an add-on or conversion tool produced it, that tool asked for yearly totals through a route Sage 50 does not support for those period types, and the correction belongs with the tool, not with your entries.
Step 2: check the fiscal year setup
“This Year” and “Last Year” are fiscal periods, not calendar years. If the company file has no properly defined prior fiscal year, for instance when the company was set up partway through a year or the fiscal year end was changed after transactions were posted, the program cannot decide which entries belong in which bucket and the totals fail. Open the fiscal year settings and confirm that a current year and at least one prior year exist and that the year end date is correct. The exact location of those settings depends on your release, so follow the labels on screen rather than a fixed path.
Step 3: test the data on a copy
Make a copy of the company file and work only on the copy. Then run the built-in maintenance and data integrity check; its name and location vary by release. If it reports errors in journals or transactions, the totals failed because the underlying records are damaged, which makes this a repair problem rather than a settings problem.
Step 4: restore a backup if damage is confirmed
If the integrity check flags journal damage, the safest fix is to restore a backup taken before the message first appeared and re-enter anything posted since. Confirm the restored file opens and reports cleanly before you rely on it.
If it appears during a conversion
When this message surfaces while moving data out of Sage 50, for example into QuickBooks, it usually means the transfer asked for yearly totals in a form the source file could not satisfy, either because of damage or because of how the periods are defined. Our engineers work around it by reading the journal data directly instead of through the failing route. If you are converting Sage 50 to QuickBooks, that is part of the job; if the file itself turns out to be damaged, Sage 50 database repair is the matching service.
Next step
Run the integrity check on a copy and note the exact result, along with what you were doing when the message appeared. Those two facts decide the fix. If the check reports errors, or if the message blocks a conversion, send us the file for a free evaluation and a no-obligation quote; what is possible depends entirely on the file, and an evaluation answers that faster than trial and error will.