Fiscal Year-End is an accounting milestone. It’s important that all financial activity for the year has been entered, processed, and updated to the general ledger. In that way, your financial statements are completely accurate.
Abio recognizes that this isn’t an easy undertaking. For that reason, the year-end is completely independent of the G/L period any of the subsystems are operating in. You can be running your payroll in March and still be working on your year-end. If you have any outstanding payments or invoices you’re waiting for, don’t run the year-end until you receive them. In fact, don’t advance the subsystem until they’re recorded. It’s okay to post to a future G/L period, but not a closed period.
Once you’ve run the year-end, the only way to change the dollar amounts in the general ledger for the previous year is through journal entries. These can be posted to the last period of the previous year. Abio will automatically adjust the opening balances for all the accounts involved in the journal entry, as well as the retained earnings account.
To run a year end, navigate to [d] General Ledger, then [g] Year End.
Abio will prompt you for a fiscal year end.
Shortening a fiscal year
In the above image, Abio is asking for the fiscal year-end. It’s defaulted the year-end to 12 months from your previous year-end. It’s also telling you that you can shorten your fiscal year if you need to. In the above example, we’ve run a G/L update for June. We can’t adjust the year-end in a way that puts the June activity into a future fiscal year. So our options for the year-end are any month between June and December.
Bring Subsystems Up to Date
You won’t be able to run your year-end if there are any outstanding issues within the subsystems. Payables, Receivables, and Payroll must all be operating in the new fiscal year before you can end the previous year.
As well, all cheques, invoices, payments, and journal entries from the past fiscal year must be posted to the general ledger and updated. This ensures the accounts include all financial activity for the year.
Inactivating Dormant Accounts
As part of the year-end, Abio will deactivate accounts that had no activity in the past year. You can re-activate the accounts if necessary.
Opening Balances
Next, Abio will create account records for the new fiscal year. Balance sheet accounts are the assets, liabilities, and stockholders’ equity accounts. They will have their outstanding amounts from the previous year rolled forward, into their opening balance. The income statement accounts (operating revenues, operating expenses, gains, and losses) will have their amounts rolled into the retained earnings account.
Jobs and Equipment
Jobs and equipment both record the financial activity by G/L period. Running the year end will move the amounts into the year opening amount.
