End of Financial Year: Preparing Sage 300

There are a couple of tasks in Sage 300 necessary to prepare for the start of a new financial year. This guide will step you through them with some suggestions for processing & reconciliation of the General Ledger. If unable to see the screens named below, please check your security settings with your system administrator.

Creating a New Year in the Fiscal Calendar

You need to create the new year in Sage 300 in order to process transactions in all the sub-modules. You can do this any time.

In Common Services, open the Fiscal Calendar window. Check to see if the next fiscal year has already been created by scrolling to the last entry. 

• If it already exists, no action is needed.
• If not, select NEW and Sage 300 will present the new calendar and auto-fill the periods based on the previous fiscal year. Save.

In both cases, we suggest you verify the period start and end dates are correctly configured and perhaps lock the future periods against accidental entries.

Creating a New Year in the General Ledger

This is the process that moves the balance of Income accounts to Retained Earnings and establishes the opening balances for Balance Sheet accounts. 

You can choose to run this process on the first day of the new financial year or wait until the bulk of the month/year end processing has been completed. If you choose to wait, you can expect error batches to accumulate in the GL for any transactions relating to the new fiscal year. Once you create the new year in the GL (and assuming in GL Options you have ticked the option to allow postings to previous years), you can continue to transact normally in the previous periods, e.g. 20XX-12, and in the background Sage 300 will adjust entries to retained earnings and opening balances accordingly. 

You should run this process at the start or end of the business day because no other users can be accessing Sage 300 while it runs. This extends to any integrated processes that post data into Sage 300. If necessary, suspend integrations from other software, e.g. e-commerce, CRM or warehouse solutions.

In preparation, we suggest that you:

1. Check with your IT support that system backups have been run successfully overnight (or immediately previous to running this process)
2. Use the Data Dump function in Administrative Services to get your own backup - because there's no harm in being extra cautious.
3. Run your GL Trial Balance report and print or save the PDF - you'll use this to verify the account movement to retained earnings.
4. Ensure no other users are logged in to Sage 300. You can check this under Help -> current users.

In GL Periodic Processing:

1. Open the Create New Year screen
2. Check the warnings and verify that the second item confirming removal of older transaction history suits your circumstances. (If not, get a Data Dump so the database can be archived)
3. Select Process

Depending on the efficiency of your servers and size of your GL chart and transaction volumes, this process may take a few minutes. It's important you let it run through to conclusion. When finished, run the GL Trial Balance report for the new fiscal year and verify that the Retained Earnings account has moved in accordance with the nett earnings position on the report for prior year end. You should of course see no entries for income and expense accounts.

If all is in order, you can re-activate any suspended integrations and allow staff to log in and commence processing. 

If you encountered any problems or issues, please log a support case with us so we can provide assistance.

Happy EOFYS!
The OpusXenta Team