How to close a financial year

[Mike or Penny Novack]

On 5/27/2017 4:56 PM, DaveC49 wrote:
> Don,
>
> I think most of your points have been covered by subsequent posts from other
> users. I think the confusion largely arises from historical accounting
> practice where each period had a physical journal and each account had  its
> own physical ledger book and entries were hand made in ink .......
>
> Accountants, being fairly anally retentive, have kept to this practice far
> longer than is really required given the capacity of software systems to
> maintain continuous recording and many people also tend to confuse the
> "closing the books" accounting procedures with opening and closing a new
> computer file
  Well .... whether they actually went to new physical volumes depended 
on the volume of transactions in a period, and often the ledger accounts 
were in a single volume. I can remember those days, not the "dark ages" 
but within my lifetime. I learned bookkeeping pen and ink on paper.

The mechanism being sought is not necessarily new volumes but the 
equivalent of the pen and ink on paper "double line". Means has been 
verified to that point and you did not go back beyond a double line << 
this was very important when errors were numerous and you had to find 
them>>  Double lines could apply to a single account OR might be drawn 
across all accounts in the books.

Rather than a "lock", perhaps a "set double line" << at some point in an 
account OR at this point across all accounts >> and you would be warned 
if you tried to do something ahead of a double line.

Michael D Novack