One or more damaged transaction in General Ledger

When attempting to generate a General Ledger Report in Sage 50, you may encounter the following error message:

“One or More Damaged Transactions in Period XXX” During General Ledger Reporting

This message can be alarming at first glance, but it points to a specific data integrity issue between ledger summaries and transaction-level details.

Root Cause

Behind the scenes, Sage 50 maintains summary totals for each General Ledger account within every fiscal period. These totals are used for faster reporting and system performance. However, this error occurs when:

• The summary total for a specific period (stored internally by Sage 50) does not match the sum of the individual transactions posted to that same account and fiscal period.

In other words, the system detects a discrepancy between what it thinks the total should be and what the actual transactions add up to.

What Causes This Mismatch?

Common triggers include:

• Errors from incompatible third-party tools or data imports
• Data corruption from an workstation crash, or power failure
• Network disruptions during transaction posting
• Importing transactions with invalid data
• Manual database edits (rare, but possible with direct file access)

Suggested Actions

1. Run Data Integrity Check/Repair Utility
   • Go to Help > Support Utilities > Integrity Check…
   • Backup your company data before continuing.
   • In the Data Synchronization Test area select Chart of Accounts / Journals
   • This tool will attempt to detect and repair inconsistencies.
   • Click OK to start the process (Take screenshots or note any error messages that appear—they’ll help if deeper investigation or support is needed.)
   • Test to see if the report runs correctly.
   • To completley test all periods for errors run the General Ledger report again but change the From Period to first in the dropdown and change the To Period 24. If you get no errors you should be good to go.
   • If you are still getting the error(s) then open the Integrity Checker again and check both Journal Balances and G/L Balances checkboxs in the File Test area.
   • Rerun you the General Ledger Report again to check for errors.
2. Still getting the error(s) after executing Data Integrity Check/Repair Utility
   • Have your data repaired using our Data Recovery Service. If your backups aren’t current—or you’d prefer to avoid the time and effort of re-entering transactions—this approach offers the most practical solution.
   • Restore a prior backup – if the issue appeared recently.