Budgets and closing the books.

[Mike or Penny Novack]

>I do this too, fudge the dates to make a dedicated "close books" day.
>
>On Aug 3, 2011, at 2:05, Johannes Kapune wrote:
>
>  
>
We need to understand what these people are saying.

This is mainly a problem for those whose fiscal year does not coincide 
with the calendar year. Those of us for whom the fiscal year ends 12/31 
can manage by using 1/1 of the next year for the book closing treating 
this date as a day "not in any year" since ordinarily there would be no 
fiscal transactions with that date (banks closed, post offices closed, 
etc.). The only annoyance in not having available a "special date" (*) 
in between is having to adjust the report start dates so as not to 
include this date. But whether that can be done for "budget" is a 
question I can't answer.

The problem with closing the books on the "last day" is that you likely 
do also have fiscal transactions that date, would to then run the end of 
year reports in between these and closing the books and the reports 
would not be rerunnable (not without backing off "close the books"). 
However could get around this by doing a "save" (backup) following the 
reports and before "close the books" followed by a second backup after 
the books were closed (which becomes the next year's books). If you need 
to rerun a report use the first backup.

Fudging the dates of transactions only acceptable for informal personal 
books, not real books.

Michael D Novack, FLMI

* The very large financial system that used to be my stamping ground had 
a special "year end" date. Requires that the calendar verification code 
recognize/allow this special date which was possible since our coding 
was in house.