Year End change

Before you start keeping a set of accounts, you must decide when your accounting year starts and ends. For most people this will be the calendar year from January to December.

If you run your own business, you may want to define a different year end month eg March, June or September.

If you choose any year end other than December, use Menu|Options|Year End Month to specify the last month of the year.

If you want to change your accounting year-end after you have been entering accounting items, you will have to go through all your previous accounting years to re-combine all the items into new year-end groupings.

If for example you have been operating on a December year-end, and you decide, eg in October, to change to a March year-end, you will need to remove all January to March items from this year and transfer them to last year. You would also need to change the January brought forward values to April values. You will need to repeat this process for all the previous years that you have recorded!

All of this is done automatically for you when you select Menu|Files|Year end change.

You will see a dialog requesting you to create or select a folder for the new year end accounts. This must be an empty folder. You will also need to specify the new year end month.

When you click OK, all the items in the current set of accounts will be transferred into the correct years in the new year end set of accounts. The system will also step through all the years in the new set carrying forward all the closing balances from the preceding year into the following year.

Finally, when the process completes, you will be able to open and work on any of the years in the new year end set of accounts.

If you have any foreign currency transactions, it is possible that the balances on affected cashflow accounts may show the wrong balances. The reason for this that the balances automatically calculated and carried forward into each succeeding year are in the Currency in Use. As a result the brought forward balances in foreign currency accounts are converted at the current exchange rate for the month. This usually results in a different value than by accumulating the individual foreign currency amounts that make up the brought forward value.

When viewing any cashflow account (the only type of account that can be in foreign currency), the brought forward value is always calculated afresh from the individual items in the account in the previous year. To be sure of having the correct value in the foreign currency accounts in the new year end set of accounts, it is necessary to access each year from the first year, and in each year to display each foreign currency account. Tedious but effective.