Fiscal Year Closing Database Recommendations for Financial Edge™ – Part 1

Hello my fellow Financial Edge™ users! That time of year is fast approaching and it is time to begin getting ready for 2016.

Now that 2015 is almost complete, it is time to begin planning for closing the year. There are a few things to consider when closing out Financial Edge™ for fiscal periods and fiscal years.

Financial Edge Offers Several Options for Fiscal Year Closing:

Soft Closing

“Soft Closing” your fiscal periods is designed to prevent posting transaction information into the period. You may re-open your periods at any time if there is ever a need to make additional entries or adjustments into these periods.

To soft close your fiscal periods:

1. From within the General Ledger, go to Configuration and Fiscal Years.

2. Select the desired fiscal year record.

3. Check the box to the right of the period that you wish to soft close.

4. Click Save and Close to save your updated fiscal year.

Optimizing

“Optimizing” your fiscal years is designed to help improve reporting speed. This process calculates and stores period account activity summaries which replace the need for the system to perform a “mock close” when running reports. It is recommended that you optimize when additional transactions will be rarely added to a fiscal year. Normally this is true for fiscal years that are two years old or older. Optimizing can be re-run if needed.

To optimize your fiscal years:

1. From within the General Ledger, go to Configuration and Fiscal Years.

2. Select Optimize Fiscal Years… from the menu bar.

3. The Optimize Fiscal Years window will open. Set the desired through date for the optimization and click Continue.

4. The system will let you know if there are unposted transactions within the selected range. The Optimizing Fiscal Years window will show the progress of the optimization processes. Click OK when completed. The status of the fiscal year will be updated to “Open – Optimized”.

Closing

“Hard Closing” your fiscal years finalizes your ending account balances and prevents further posting into the closed year. Hard closing is not necessary as the system performs a “mock close” when financial statement reports are generating. Hard closing can improve the speed of generating reports. But, keep this important thing in mind, this process cannot be reversed. The only way to re-open a closed fiscal year is through restoring the database from a backup.

1. From within the General Ledger, go to Administration and select Close Fiscal Years.

2. The Close Fiscal Year window will allow you to select your closing options and report options. It is strongly recommended that you select the Action to run the “Pre-close Report” prior to closing your fiscal year. You can also use the Fund filter tab to specify specific Funds to include.

3. Review the pre-close report to make certain that the total debits and credits are correct.

4. Once you have reviewed the report and are confident in the outcome, proceed with the pre-close and close processes to “hard close” the selected fiscal year.

Happy New Year!!

Learn More From our Other Blackbaud Financial Edge™ Tutorials:

• Financial Edge™ Training and Consulting Services
• The Best Financial Edge™ Reports for Reconciliation Efforts
• How to Create Dashboards in The Financial Edge™

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