Year End Facilities - Cashbook

Most users will not have this option on their menu. If you are running a nominal ledger then you use the nominal year-end processes to close years and open new years. If however, you do not have a nominal ledger then read on.

The cash book keeps all periods of the year open, so there are no particular actions which need to be taken at the end of each period. For your convenience you can set the default period number to the current period so that you do not need to keep changing the period number when posting transactions.

The year-end procedures themselves take place in two distinct phases. Firstly, you need to start a new year in the cash book as soon as, or even shortly before, the new year has itself started. Secondly — at some convenient time — you need to close down the old year and do some housekeeping on the cash book such as to clear down historic transactions.

You usually need to start a new year in your cash book as soon the new year actually starts. The sales ledger and the purchase ledger in particular, may not be ready to close down yet, however. They are therefore positioned in the last period of the old year, so that you can continue to post transactions dated in that period even though you have now started the new year. Read the Overview section in the Introduction chapter to give you the full picture about how multiple periods are managed.

In fact you cannot start a new year until the old year is closed — but there is no reason to leave the old year open for many months if you are not using the nominal ledger.Once you’ve started a new year, you can keep the old year open for as long as it takes to reconcile the bank statements for the period up to the end of the old year. Then you can close the old year. At that time you may want to clear down old transactions too.

As with any procedure altering files on a global basis, it is recommended that you take security copies of your files before you undertake any year-end procedures.