Accounting periods are used in SedonaOffice to track your Accounts within a specific period of time. By using Accounting Periods your company may generate reports based on consistent periods from both within a fiscal year and period vs. period for previous fiscal years. SedonaOffice supports a twelve (12) period fiscal year.
The Accounting Periods form displays the Current Account Period in which your company is conducting business and a list of each accounting period within the current fiscal year and each accounting period in the next fiscal year. Having two fiscal accounting years available allows your company to move into the next fiscal year without having to close out the previous year. This gives your company up to 12 months to finalize the previous year transactions before it must be closed to allow the next year to be opened.
Each Accounting Period is assigned one of four statuses; Future, Open, Closed, and Re-Open.
- Future - All accounting periods where business has not yet been conducted is set to Future.
- Open - When your company is ready to begin entering transactions into a period, the User will change the status to Open. Once a period status has been set to Open, Users will be able to post transactions with any date within that accounting period.
- Closed - Once your company has determined all transactions for the accounting period have been completed, a User will change the status of the currently open period to Closed. Once the status has been set to Closed, Users will not be able to post any transactions into the closed period. If the Deferred Income for the period has not yet been posted, the application will not allow you to change the accounting period status to Closed until this has been completed.
- Re-Open - Once an accounting period status has been set to Closed, a User may change the status to Re-Open. This will allow certain staff members the ability to post transactions into the previously closed accounting period. The ability to post transactions into a Re-Opened period is controlled by a User Group Security option; Access to Re-opened Periods.
The Current Accounting Period field at the top of the Accounting Periods form may only be advanced to the next accounting period once the deferred income for the prior period has been earned. Click here for more information on deferred income recognition.
