Accounting periods help you to control how you report on your company's financial position. Using accounting periods gives you an easy way to measure your income and expenses in small chunks.
When you first set up Sage 200, 12 accounting periods were created for you. These are set to match the calendar months by default and were set up for your current year and for five future years. You can change the dates of your periods as long as you haven't entered any transactions.
In Sage 200, you use your accounting periods to control when and if transactions can be posted to a period. Once a period is Closed, no further transactions can be posted to that period, regardless of the date of the transaction. This means that you can print a report for a period, such as a Profit and Loss or trial balance, knowing that this will never change.
Your accounting periods are further sub-divided depending on the module that your transactions are posted to. These are Sales, Purchases, Cash Book,
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Sales.
This controls sales transactions that do not affect your bank accounts. These are sales invoices, sales credit notes and discounts.
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Purchases.
This controls purchase transactions that do not affect your bank accounts. These are purchase invoices, purchase credit notes and discounts.
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Cash Book.
This controls all transactions that affect your bank accounts, such as sales receipts, purchase payments, direct debits and standing orders.
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Stock.
This controls stock movement transactions that create a nominal journal. This also covers all transactions created by the Bill of Materials module.
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Nominal Adjustments.
This controls transactions directly entered into the Nominal Ledger, such as journals, prepayments and accruals
Posting transactions
Transactions are posted to your nominal accounts depending on the posting date of the transaction and the status of the period.
Each period can have a status of Open, Closed or Future.
- Transactions are posted to the relevant period based on the transaction date.
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If more than one period is open, the date of the transaction is used to determine which period the transaction is posted into.
For example, your financial year starts in January, so January is period 1, February is period 2, etc. You post two transactions one dated 20th January and one dated 4th February. Both periods are open. The first transaction is posted to period 1 and the second to period 2.
- You can't change the dates of an open period if any transactions have been posted into that period from any of the modules.
- You can't post any transactions into a closed period.
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Any transactions which have a date in a closed period, are posted to the next open period.
For example, you have closed period 1 (January) for sales transactions, but period 2 (February) is still open. You enter a transaction dated 20th January. The transaction is posted to period 2 (February), because it is the next open period.
- You can't change the dates of a period if any of the modules are Closed for that period.
- Transactions dated in a Future period are not posted to your nominal accounts but are held in a kind of limbo called Deferred.
- Deferred transaction are posted to your customer, supplier and bank accounts but are not included in the balance of nominal accounts.
- Deferred transactions are posted to the nominal account when the relevant period is opened.
- You can change the dates of a Future period.
Opening and closing accounting periods
When you first configure Sage 200, all your accounting periods are set to Future by default. When you're ready to start entering transactions, you'll need to open your accounting periods. The number of periods that you open is entirely up to you, you can have one or 12 periods open at the same time.
The same is true for closing a period. You can close periods when it suits your business. However, you will need to close all the periods in your current year before you move into a new financial year.
Month end
Sage 200 does not have a official month end process that you must follow. You can close your accounting periods whenever you want to prevent transactions being posted to that period.
Sage 200 won't allow you to close a period until all your standing orders and direct debits have been processed for the period. Apart from that, you can decide with your accountant or auditor which reports, checks and tasks you want to perform prior to closing a period.
See Month end
Year end
You must close all your accounting periods before you move to a new financial year. There will also be additional checks and tasks you need to preform. See Year End.
Controlling who can open and close accounting periods
As this is such an important area of your business, additional permissions are required to make changes to your accounting periods. This is where you choose which users can change your accounting periods.
What do you want to do?
View and manage accounting periods