Hi Peter - just to give you background to this.
You've hit on a clash between accounting law/regulation and what's easier for the person keeping the books. Under accounting regulation and standards "Trade creditors" ie unpaid bills, should, as the name suggests, relate to sums owed to other businesses, ie those who supply goods & services to the business. This isn't only for the purposes of year end accounting but also, when analysing how a business is operating, it's valuable to be able to differentiate trade debts from non-trade debts.
Depending on how you configure your CB accounts, when you look at the Trade creditors report, not only will you see these trade debts but you'e also likely to see unpaid bills from HMRC, for VAT &/or PAYE as well as unpaid bills from directors & employees for salaries &/or expense claims. Consequently, when the annual statutory accounts are prepared these non-trade debts have to be split out into separate pre-defined categories of creditors.
Typically, accountants do not like having to do this plus, as I said, they prefer to see debts properly differentiated generally, and so, to assist in this, there are actually toggle features that stop VAT returns and employee expenses from generating bills.
So, when the dividend tool was re-written, to correctly create a company wide dividend and also suitable paperwork, a decision had to be made over whether to retain the old bill creation or mimic what happens with the expenses toggle and generate individual creditor accountants for each person. Of all the things that are not trade creditors, dividend declarations are at the top of the list and so it was decided to treat them outside that area.
I do realise that this is annoying as it's great to have just one place to go to to see what the business owes day to day, but accounting software should really help the business comply properly with regulation and, as John says, if you want to replicate what happened in the past, create a bill for each person's dividend and point it at the new dividend creditor account.
Just in case it's of any help. In my and my clients' books, if the shareholders are also directors we tend to use the director's loan account (in the bank screen) to pay off anything owed to the director, be it dividends, salary or expense claims which effectively moves everything owed to the one account and then, any payments to the director out of the main bank account are just treated as transfers to this "bank" account.
Best answer
You must 