Accounting Year End

If you run your accounts from TBS, then there are a couple of additional things you may wish to do prior to running the General Ledger Month End for period 12 in any year

Firstly, the standard report you will want to run to give to your accountants - which they will use to audit and create your final tax returns - is the Accounts --> General Ledger --> General Ledger Accounts --> Reports menu option : General Ledger Daybook

This will open a window requesting the report parameters :

As stated - for your year end report (run once you have *ALL* your own year end entries completed) - change the period number to period 0 in order to print out all entries for the whole year

This report shows, for each general ledger account code, the year opening balance, then all the entries for the year, and the year closing balance

Run the month end

Once you have run your additional daybook report as described above, you can run a General Ledger Month End in your normal manner.

TBS does some additional processing when it sees a month end is being run for period 12

For each general ledger account entry - a new record is created for the new year. The month end balances of the current year are entered as the 'Previous Year' month end balances, which can be used for comparison purposes within your reports if desired. And the 'Current Year' balances are created empty (Balance sheet codes will open with the closing balance of the current year)

All current year transactions are archived at the year end update. As are the current year general ledger account entries.

Once you have run your month 12 General Ledger Month End, the only thing that TBS does not do for you is to move the contents of the Balance Sheet 'Profit/Loss' for the Current Year. (It does not know where you want to move it to !)

Under a system administrator login, it is therefore recommended that you do the following in order to complete your new year starting position:

Locate your Balance Sheet Profit/Loss entry in the General Ledger Account Codes list :

Edit this entry :

Make a note of the Opening 1 value (you will need to know it shortly !) and zero out the Opening 1 field and save this code

Generally you will have an equity section entry known as 'Reserves' or 'Capital' or something like that ! Find this entry and edit - and add the value that you removed above to whatever the current value is of Opening 1 - effectively we are simply shifting the balance from one code to another here so that the Profit/Loss code can show you the correct year-to-date figure within your Balance Sheet report. This step is not strictly required but does help greatly with clarity of understanding your Balance Sheet reports.

Accountants Adjustments

Once your accountants have completed their audit and prepared your final tax returns, it is likely that some (hopefully only small !) changes may be made to your Balance Sheet code values which affect your opening balances for the new year. It is important that you understand this next step and execute it properly.

What we are going to do is to edit the opening balances for the current year of any balance sheet codes according to the accountants final values. We do this using a similar method to that described above for moving the Profit/Loss value i.e. we will edit the appropriate general ledger account code entry for the current year - and change the value of Opening 1. As it can often be some time (months) until the final figures are agreed it is often the case that several periods have passed of the new year before the opening adjustments are made - as you will have seen, when changing the opening 1 value - TBS asks if you wish to make the same relative change to all periods of the current year, which in this case you do - and any change that you made to period 1 is then replicated through all periods up to the current period of the year.

Note : because your accounts need to 'balance' - making manual changes in this manner is DANGEROUS. So once you have completed all of the individual account code changes made due to year end adjustments, it is highly recommended that you print a Trial Balance for period 1 of the current year - to ensure that the Opening Balance still shows an overall balance of zero after you have completed your changes. If it does not, you need to find out why and fix it before proceeding any further with your accounts entries.