It's the most wonderful time of the year: General Ledger Year End

4 minute read time.

In our final Year End blog post, we took a look at how to perform a Year End in General Ledger.

You probably can guess what the first step in a GL Year End is. If you guessed perform a good backup then you are correct!

Next we will create a new calendar year by going into Common Services then Fiscal Calendar where we will add a New Year.

After creating a New Year, lock all periods of your current fiscal year to prevent accidental postings. If you have not completed your Year End, leave Period 12 unlocked. For your future year, lock all 12 periods but since you will have some transactions to post in Period 1, unlock this period. Note that you must create a fiscal calendar for the following year before proceeding. After completing this, transactions can be posted to the New Year.

When you create a New Year, it opens the accounts for the next year, removes history depending on what you setup in GL setup options, creates and posts entries that transfer the balances of income and expense accounts to retained earnings and changes the current fiscal year to the following year.

Before you begin your GL Year End, make sure that transactions from all subledgers and all journal entries are posted.

Your Batch List may have a mixture of current and future batches. Post any current year transactions but you won’t be able to post any future transactions because Year End has not been completed. If try to post to a future year end, you will get an error. However, Year End can still be performed and these transactions can be posted to the previous year.

So what about the additional transactions for last year? These can still be posted to the prior year if the setting in GL setup is selected.

Also in G/L Options, you can select how long you want to keep fiscal sets and transaction details.

Next print any outstanding trial balance and financial reports as well as print and clear any posting journals.

Before proceeding to the next step, you may also want to do another backup as the next step is a critical one.

The next step is to create a New Year under G/L Periodic Processing.

Before we begin, the Create New Year process in GL requires a default retained earnings account be selected in options.


Once selected, this step doesn’t have to be set every year.

Also under G/L Periodic Processing you can do a Period End Maintenance prior to creating a New Year.

Here you can delete any:

  • Inactive accounts
  • Transaction Detail History
  • Fiscal Set History
  • Reset Batch Numbers – this will reset the batch number to 1. This is optional and we recommend you don’t reset your batch numbers if you don’t have a lot of transactions going through the year.

 

 Next click on the Create New Year icon:


When you click on this icon, you will see the following screen:

This screen outlines what creating a New Year in G/L will do. If you’ve created the fiscal calendar for the New Year and also have done a backup, click on Process.

If transactions are posted to a prior year, Create New Year does not have to be run again. When a transaction for a prior year has been posted in GL, Sage 300 ERP automatically transfers any incoming expense balances to retained earnings thus keeping the balances correct.

Finally, in Administrative services, a Data Integrity Check should be run after all Year End processes have been completed. Database dump and load should be performed as well (useful when data has been purged from the system). These reduces the size of the databases and re-indexes tables to provide a more efficient database.

Here is a simple checklist to follow when completing your GL Year End:

 Run Create New Year to transfer balances in the income and expense accounts to retained earnings and enter opening balances for the new year.

 Print and clear the Batch Status report and the posting journal generated when you created the new year.

 Using Period End Maintenance, delete prior-year fiscal sets, and reset batch numbers.

Don’t forget to check out our other Year End blog posts on Accounts Receivable and Accounts Payable.

And so ends our blog series on Year End Procedures in Sage 300 ERP. Best of luck on your Year End. If you have any tips of your own, share them in the comments.

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