Closing an Accounting Year in Connected

When a year is closed in Connected the following will happen:

• A Year-end closing journal entry is created that clears out the income statement accounts and then enters the year end profit/loss into the retained earnings account
• Connected moves the year's balances of accounts into the previous years' fields
• Changes the beginning date of the fiscal year to the following year
• Adjustment of the beginning balance for balance sheet accounts
• Calculate customer customer, vendor, item, and sales rep's year to date (YTD) totals to transfer to the new fiscal year

Connected allows transactions to be entered for 6 more periods, after the year end date, while waiting for adjusting entries from the company external accountant/auditor.

WARNING: If you reach the end of the 18th period, you will not be able to make any entries going forward until the year is closed in the G/L. Warnings, like the one shown below, will continue to pop-up as the final day of the 18th period approaches.

TIP:  We recommend that the Close Year procedure be performed at the computer that hosts your data file for fastest performance. This is not necessary but if your company has a large data file this can greatly reduce the time required for the closing processing.

TIP:  Closing the year in Connected does not purge any data. If you would like to purge old data see the following article on purging/deleting data. Reference: Purging Data in Connected

Closing the Accounting Year 

Ensure that all months have been closed in all available modules and that you have printed all necessary year-end reports.

Closing an Accounting Period in Connected

 Since income statement accounts are cleared and YTD totals are recalculated, some reports cannot be printed after closing.

WARNING: It is essential that you make a backup copy of the data before closing the year. DO NOT PROCEED WITHOUT A VERIFIED BACKUP OF YOUR DATA.  A year end closing cannot be reversed.

Reference:

How to Create a Manual Back Up File Using the ODBA Application
How to Manually Back Up a Connected on Demand data file

Prior to closing, you should print the year end Balance Sheet and Income Statement and compare the net profit figure on both statements to ensure that they are equal. It is advisable that the Customer Aging and Vendor Aging reports also be verified against the Accounts Receivable and Accounts Payable control accounts in the General Ledger.Please contact our technical support department if you are unsure or find an anomaly.

To close the year in Connected:

1) Select Close Year from the "File" menu, as shown in the following screen:

2) The following warning dialog box appears:

3) Before proceeding, ensure that you have a verified backup of your data file. To proceed, select the I understand this warning and have a verified backup of my data checkbox and click Proceed to continue.

4) Connected checks the periods to ensure they have all been closed. If all periods have been closed the following message will appear:

5) Click OK and carefully review your year end closing entry. Click the Print icon to generate a printed copy for file purposes.  A sample entry is shown in the following screen.

NOTE: After reviewing the year end adjusting entry, you may want to cancel the procedure. Cancelling will automatically delete the year ending adjusting entry that was created. The next time you try to close the year, the year end adjusting entry will be recalculated.

6) Click Cancel to exit or click Proceed to being the closing process.

7) This procedure can take a very long time (hours) depending on the size of your data file. Once the closing procedure has completed, a dialog box will display: