Sage 50 error: "An error occurred while moving current year's data to last year
Sage 50 failed partway through rolling your books into a new fiscal year, so the year-end move did not complete and the data may be inconsistent.
If Sage 50 has just shown you “General LedgerrAn error occurred while moving current year’s data to last year.” then your year-end close has failed. The stray letter where “General Ledger” meets the rest of the text is a display quirk, not a separate problem. When you close a fiscal year and start a new one, Sage 50 reorganizes the ledger: the year that was current becomes “last year”, its figures shift into prior-year columns, and a fresh current year opens. “Moving” has nothing to do with relocating a file; it is that internal reorganization, and it stopped partway through.
Why it happens
Almost always because something in the company data is damaged or inconsistent: a broken journal entry, a corrupted index, an orphaned record somewhere in the ledger. The year-end roll touches nearly every account and transaction summary in the file, so it is often the first process to trip over damage that day-to-day posting tolerated. It can also follow an interrupted year-end, such as a power cut, a forced close, or a dropped network connection midway through. A company with many years of history is more likely to hit it than a young one. It is not a licence, password, or installation problem.
Stop before you retry
Do not run the year-end close repeatedly hoping it will go through. Each attempt writes to the data, and a half-finished move plus repeated retries makes recovery harder. Your books may also be sitting in a mid-move state where some figures have shifted and others have not, so balances can look wrong; avoid posting new entries until this is resolved. First, copy the entire folder that holds your company data somewhere safe, or take a fresh backup, and work only on that copy.
Restore the backup taken before the year-end
If you have a backup from before you started the year-end process, restoring it is the cleanest route back to a known-good state. Anything posted since that backup will need re-entering, so check the dates before you commit. Once restored, retry the year-end only if you understand what went wrong the first time; if the same error returns, the data itself is the problem.
Run the built-in data check
Sage 50 includes a data verification tool, though where it lives depends on your version and edition. Run it and read what it reports. If it finds and fixes errors, retry the year-end on the restored copy. If it reports damage it cannot repair, or the year-end fails again, stop there: repeated failed passes add to the damage rather than clearing it.
When the file needs professional repair
A year-end that will not complete is one of the more reliable signs of genuine corruption in a Sage 50 file, and it will not clear on its own. We repair damaged Sage 50, Peachtree and Simply Accounting databases, completing the interrupted year-end move as part of the work so your books open cleanly in the new year. If you were planning to leave Sage anyway, a file in this state can usually still be converted to QuickBooks, and we can repair and convert in a single pass rather than doing the work twice.
If the error survives a restore from backup, send us the company data for a free evaluation before you try anything else. Our engineers will identify exactly what the year-end move is tripping over, tell you plainly whether it can be repaired, and provide a no-obligation quote; cost and timing depend on the file, which is why we assess each one individually.