Protrax Year-End Suggestions for GL
Save Time at Year-End by Taking Advantage of the Following Resources

Year-End Planning
Year-end can be a very stressful and confusing time for most companies and one of the items that seems to be most confusing is how and when to close your General Ledger (GL). Your CFO and/or Controller may have requests for you to get accurate reports in January but want you to leave GL open until they are ready to enter their Year-End Adjustments. What are your options?

On the following pages we give you all the options. You can show these options to your CFO/Controller and see which they want you to use. No matter which one they choose, we give you the step-by-step instructions.

In addition to the following instructions, these KB Articles, which are available to print out from Axium Online, may be of special interest to you.

Software Support Assistance
For clients printing payroll checks in-house, you will receive an email notification to download tax changes as they become available.

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General Ledger Year-End Procedures
Below is a checklist of tasks to be completed for General Ledger at fiscal year-end.

Complete Month-End Processing

• Verify all entries are entered and posted. Verify the journal does not contain rejected entries for the current year.
  
• Reconcile General Ledger.
  
• Verify that all suspense type accounts have a zero balance. This is necessary for the Close Fiscal Year task to properly roll balances and post to retained earnings.
  
• Print the appropriate month-end and year-end reports that are required by your company.

Close the Year in General Ledger
After the last month of your firm’s fiscal year is completed and all reports have been run, the fiscal year needs to be closed in order to close out the profit and loss accounts to retained earnings and prepare GL for the first period of the new year.

The Close Fiscal Year task creates entries to zero the income and expense account balances and post net income to the retained earnings account. Closing entries are automatically stored in the history transaction file. The following fields will roll forward in the GL master file:

• Fiscal year-ending date
• Period end dates
• Year-end balances one year ago through Year-end five years ago
• Balance one year ago
• Account activity amounts one period
• Zeros out current activity on all accounts
• Moves any posted future activity to the correct activity field balance

Close Year Options

You have the option to close the fiscal year prior to entering year-end adjustments or hold the fiscal year open until you have received your year-end adjustments from your CPA. The option you select determines when you can print financial reports for the new fiscal year.

Option 1: Close Year Before Year-End Adjustments - 

This option allows you to print all the standard reports for each period in the new fiscal year.
When you receive adjusting entries for the previous year, post the entries as prior year adjustments. Then print adjusted financial statements for the prior year and for each period in the new year.

Option 2: Close Year After Year-End Adjustments - 

This option leaves your fiscal year open until you are ready to make adjusting entries. If you leave the fiscal year open, the current period is the fiscal ending period. For example, if your fiscal year closes in December, GL will have a current period of December. You can process entries for up to six months into the future.

Although you are allowed to post entries to future periods, there are limitations for standard financial reports as noted below:

• You are NOT able to print the Trial Balance or Financial Statements for periods in the new fiscal year because there is no Roll Forward feature.
• You can print the Year-to-date Ledger, by marking the specify date range field. This will allow you to enter a start and end date.
• As an option, you can design custom reports using Report Designer and Financial Statements.

Important Notes:

• As part of the reconciliation process, it is important to make sure that the balance of the suspense account is zero. The close year task will not clear the suspense account which could affect the retained earnings entry.
• Do not run the Close Current Period task, since the Close Fiscal Year task closes the final period of the fiscal year.
• Closing entries are not reflected in the activity field for the last month of the fiscal year. This allows Protrax to retain the actual activity totals for the last period of the fiscal year for comparative reporting purposes.
• Axium recommends Option 1, closing the year before year-end adjustments. This option allows you to continue to provide monthly financial reports to your firm’s management while waiting for any prior year adjustments from your CPA.