About Fiscal Years and Periods

Sage 300 ERP lets you use a 12 or 13 period year, depending on your requirements. The fiscal calendar for Sage 300 ERP is maintained by Common Services, not by the General Ledger program.

You select the number of periods for your company on the Common Services Company screen, on the Options tab. If you change this setting, the next fiscal year you create will have the new number of periods.

You can lock and unlock individual fiscal periods with the Common Services Calendar screen.

• Select 12 if your fiscal year is divided into calendar months.
• Select 13 if your fiscal year is divided into 4-week periods, or if you currently use 12 periods but want to change (you will need to enter historical figures recalculated over 13 periods). If you select 13, you must also select the Quarter With 4 Periods.

In either case, General Ledger provides two additional periods: one for year-end adjustments, and one for closing entries.

Current Fiscal Year

When you first select a newly created company, Common Services Activation prompts you for the starting date of your fiscal year. Sage 300 ERP uses the starting date you specify to create the current fiscal year in the fiscal calendar. General Ledger activation uses this date and the Oldest Fiscal Year Starting Date to determine how many fiscal calendars it needs to create.

For example, if your year starts in April, and it is now June, 2001, your current fiscal year is 2002. General Ledger creates calendars for prior fiscal years up to the current year, and it also creates a calendar for the current fiscal year if one does not already exist.

Note: The Current Fiscal Year you specify during activation is used only to create the correct fiscal calendars. It is not the current fiscal period after activation. When activation is finished, General Ledger sets the current fiscal year to the year before the oldest fiscal year you specified, so you can enter the opening balances for your ledger.

The current fiscal year in the General Ledger program is the year to which you are posting transactions. At any time, you can check which year is current by looking on the Posting tab of the G/L Options screen.

The only way to change the current year is to use the Create New Year screen. Create New Year closes the income and expense accounts to retained earnings, and makes the new year the current year. You cannot post to a future year.

You cannot move the current year to a prior year, although you can post to prior years. When you post to a prior year, General Ledger automatically generates any necessary closing entries to retained earnings.

To avoid prior-year posting when adding historical data (and all the additional closing entries it would create), General Ledger activation sets the current fiscal year to the year before the oldest fiscal year you specified, so you can enter the opening balances for your ledger.

Oldest Fiscal Year Starting Date

General Ledger uses the Oldest Fiscal year Starting Date for two separate purposes:

• To create fiscal calendars that begin with this month and date.

  General Ledger creates calendars for the current year and all previous years to one year before the date you enter here. The year prior to the Oldest Fiscal Year is required for opening balances, which you post to period 12 or 13 of the year.

• To set the current fiscal year to oldest year so that you can enter your prior-year data and opening balances.

The best way to add prior-year data is to:

• Set the fiscal year to the first year, enter and post final-period balances, then create the next year (thereby closing the current-year income and expense accounts to retained earnings and moving the current fiscal year to the newly opened year).
• Enter and post period net changes for each of the prior years, creating a new year after entering each year's batches to close to retained earnings and advance the current fiscal year.
• Enter and post current-year transactions (or period net changes) up to the current period.

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