About Financial Years and Periods

Each company's financial year is divided into a defined number of accounting periods for auditing and reporting purposes. When a new FinancialForce document is created, its accounting period is calculated from the document date, or by default from the period that contains the date of input. The transactionClosed A record created when documents are posted to the general ledger. Transactions must balance (sum to zero) in home, dual, and document currency. generated when the document is posted to the general ledgerClosed Central repository for all your business transactions. Each transaction is posted to a general ledger account. inherits its period setting.

An example financial calendar (12 trading periods of 4-4-5 weeks) might look like this:

Period Description Weeks Group
000 Opening
001 Trading Periods 4 Q1
002 4
003 5
004 4 Q2
005 4
006 5
007 4 Q3
008 4
009 5
010 4 Q4
011 4
012 5
100 Adjustment Period
101 Closing

Notes

  • If you plan to use FinancialForce Reporting or share data with other accounting applications, we strongly recommend that you use a year and period format of YYYY/PPP.
  • Be careful when naming years. Generated period identifiers are automatically named Year Name/Period Number. So, avoid using special characters like / in your year name.
  • You must have at least one trading period and can have up to 90.
  • Each company can have a different number of periods and a different period calculation basisClosed Defines the interval between end dates when you split a financial year into periods.
  • You must create years in chronological order and calculate each year's periods before creating subsequent years.
  • Years cannot overlap or have a gap between them.
  • Periods cannot overlap or have gaps between them.

Open and Closed Periods

A period can be marked as Open, Soft Closed, or Hard Closed to particular GLA groups: Accounts Receivable (AR), Accounts Payable (AP), and Cash. By assigning general ledger accounts to a particular GLA group. For example you can choose to close a period for your accounts payable, but leave it open for your accounts receivable. If you do not want to use GLA groups, a period will be open to all general ledger accounts until you select “All GLAs” for either the Soft Close or Hard Close options.

You cannot save a document to a period set to Hard Close unless the period is only closed to certain GLA groups. For more information on closing and reopening a period, and on how different closing options control the saving and posting of documents, see Editing and Deleting Years and Periods.

You cannot post a document that creates a transaction for a Hard Closed period, unless the period is only Hard Closed to certain GLA groups. All postings are affected, including cash matching and currency revaluation journals. However, you can still post journals to a Soft Closed period.

Once the Hard Close option is selected for a period with “All GLAs” selected, that period is fully closed for all general ledger accounts, all document types and all users.

Managing your Years and Periods

The Years tab displays a home page that lets you quickly create and locate your financial years and periods. The Periods tab provides an alternative way to maintain period details when you want to open or close multiple periods on a single page. You can also sort and filter your financial years using standard and custom list viewsClosed Give you instant access to specific sets of data. In addition to using existing views, you can create custom list views for the items most relevant to you.. In addition, this tab lets you view and edit detailed information on each financial year and period.

To reopen a period across all GLA groups or for one specific group, the close option selected needs to be removed before more transactions or journals can be posted to the specific GLA group. The period can then be closed again.

The Year and Period objects are both company-owned objects. Each company can have a different financial calendar.