Period/Year End Facilities - Nominal

The two user-defined options here determine what occurs when you clear the nominal transactions file.

When Clear Transaction File, Write B/F Balances?

You can choose here whether or not to write a transaction for each account to hold the opening year balance on that account. Accounts which have a zero opening balance do not give rise to such transactions.

The reason you might want to do this is so that an audit trail running balance, which only accumulates its values from the transactions, should truly reflect the account balance.

If you are keeping transactions for the whole year, then you would normally set this option. However, if you decide to keep only a few months’ transactions on file, then you would normally leave this option blank as there is little benefit in keeping brought forward balance transactions in this case.

If Yes, Write For Each Existing Trans Analysis?

If you have elected to write brought-forward transactions for accounts, and you also make use of the analysis code feature, then you may want to split each balance down into the amounts against each analysis code. If so, set this option, and a brought forward transaction is written for each analysis code for an account, their total being the brought forward balance for that account.

For example, if you are using the analysis code for purposes of project costing, then it may be important to bring forward into the new year the costs expended so far against each project, so that the accumulation of these costs are not lost at the year end.(Note that profit and loss accounts are reset to zero as part of the end-of-year routines, so such project costs would need to be accumulated under balance sheet codes if they are to be retained over a year-end.)