Does Manager clear fiscal year-end income and expense amounts and move them to retained earnings? What is the step-by-step procedure for year-end? How do I clear out the old year and start the new year?
Thanks
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Yes good question, i also dont know exactly what do to.
I started today to open a new file for 2015, but All Business info and the customers i could not transfer
Don’t open a new file. Manager maintains all the old records in the same file. One of it’s nice features is that you don’t need to go through the classic closing operations of creating income summaries, making closing journal entries, etc. Simply click on the Customize button on the summary page. Then change the from date to the beginning of the new accounting year. Summary will now display the “temporary” or income statement accounts as though you had closed them and started fresh.
You may wish to make journal entries to close Expense Claims, Drawing, or similar accounts to owner’s equity or capital accounts (depending on how you’ve set up your chart of accounts).
I find I don’t even need a drawing account for my sole proprietorship. I just make transfers directly to owner’s equity.
My year-end closeout literally included three steps:
- Resetting the from date for the Summary display.
- Closing Expense Claims to owner’s equity so that accounts reflects what I still have invested in the business.
- Closing Retained Earnings to owner’s equity. This resets the Retained Earnings balance to zero. For the rest of the accounting period, that default account operates like an Income Summary account would during normal closing operations.
I hope that helps.
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@Tut is correct. Don’t open new business for new financial year. Manager is designed to handle multi-year data. This is useful so if you need to examine history of customer or supplier account, you get full history, not just current financial year.
So simply continue using the same file in new financial year. There is no necessary year-end procedure, you can generate reports for any period going back many years if necessary.
See: Guides | Manager
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Thanks for you quick response, I will delete the new files and continue the already created file in 2014
Tut said:
Simply click on the Customize button on the summary page. Then change the from date to the beginning of the new accounting year.
I also needed to “close out” my calendar/fiscal year but was confused by the directions above, as there is no “from date” on the customize page. I found that clicking the “set period” box on the summary page and changing from the old date (1-1-2015) to 1-1-2016 zeroed out the appropriate accounts. I am running Manager 15.1.67. Perhaps the layout is different in my version.
Current version is 16.1.0. You are hundreds of versions out of date and the previous thread is a year old.
You have correctly found the new location for setting the reporting time frame.
There really are no other steps to take for closing out the year, because Manager is a perpetual accounting system. You only need to change the date range you are looking at. Also, if you read my old post, there is a still simpler version. If you are a sole proprietor, the retained earnings are yours, as well as any capital account or other form of equity account. So you can actually just rename Retained earnings as Owner's equity.
Tut, you are correct, I was on an outdated version. I just updated to 16.1.1 Thanks for pointing that to out to me.
Tut,
I am running the cloud version of Manager. When I click Customize there is no option to set Start Date. Can you please help on how to change the date range to reflect only the business from Jan 1st 2016?
The Customize link only allows you to enable or disable modules. The reporting time frame is set on the Summary page, at the top left. There is a button named Set Period.
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Thanks Tut. Found it.
Very dangerous to keep multi year data in one file akin to keeping all the eggs in one basket. Sadly , Manager doesn"t have year end closing. If wrongly input a transaction that belongs to last year accounts, god bless you, your accounts opening balance, etc all messed up.
Under Settings you will find a feature called “Lock Date”, by setting this you can prevent transactions be entered prior to the date you set.
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why complicate matters with “lock date” function. It’s easier and efficient to keep separate database in separate folder for each financial year data.
It doesn’t complicate matters.
MYOB, Quicken, QuickBooks, and many other popular accounting packages all work in similar ways.
This provides the ability to review prior years data without the need to open separate files.
What you suggest used to be practised around the turn of the century but rather redundant now.
The control of data entry is the responsiblity of the user not the accounting package
@BrandyHeng, if everything is in separate databases, you cannot access previous period information. The perpetual nature of Manager is a huge convenience and work saver. Just reset the Summary period and create new desired reports.
The lock date is not a complication, it is a convenience for users who requested it so non-owner data-entry personnel could not modify historical data. You do not have to use it.
Sometimes, a product is not for everyone. If you don’t like Manager’s approach, perhaps you should look for another package. Yours is the first complaint I’ve ever read about year-end closing with Manager. Others have asked for help understanding it, because it is so simple compared to some other applications. But no one has suggested they would rather go through old-fashioned traditional closing, which is really left over from the days of manual bookkeeping.
Very simple to look back at other financial year data. When you select to open company accounts , user will have an option to select from a drop down menu which financial year . Example
FY2016 data stored in folder /sample company//FY2016
FY2015 data stored in folder / sample company/FY2015
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What if you want to generate comparative profit & loss statement for last 5 years? What if you want to look up when was the last time some customer has purchased something from you? What if you want to look up transaction which has purchased specific fixed asset many years ago?
These are examples where it’s important to have data in single file rather than fragmented in multiple databases.
Old-generation accounting packages still break financial years into separate files but it’s a HUGE mess. For example, when new financial year starts, before you start entering data in new financial year, you need to close the old financial year so the closing balances in old file and opening balances in new file are frozen. And this is terrible because who can possibly “close” their financial year on the first day of new financial year? Nobody. Many businesses will make accounting adjustments many months after old accounting period ends (think profit distribution, depreciation etc.), because their accounting firm didn’t have time to look at it earlier.
The reason why old-generation accounting packages do it that way is because back in the days computers were too slow and didn’t have much memory to be able to scale multiple years. This was a workaround, not a feature.
However. It will be possible in future to purge accounting history from existing accounting file and replace the history with new opening balances. So Manager will allow this but not because I want to encourage people to go year-by-year but perhaps some people want to keep in Manager only up to 5 years of their accounting data.
Or in your case, you would purge everything from prior period but you wouldn’t do it on day 1 of new accounting period but only after all accounting adjustments are made in previous period which could be many months into your new accounting period.
This is best of the both worlds as it gives you ability to have accounting file with 1 year data only without the mess of “closing” in old-generation accounting systems.
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Simple. Example…
This is how to you process past 5 years comparative P&L statement…
Go to folder FY2011, generate P&L figures to a temporary file
Next go to folder FY2012, generate P&L figures to a temporary file
Repeat processing until you reached the FY 2016
Inside the temporary file, you will have sales,2011,YTD figure
followed by sales,2012,YTD figure and so forth.
Now from the temporary file , you generate the 5 years figures , year by year,columnwise
Again, looking for past years transaction is simply. Create a function to query the database starting from what Financial year to what Financial year, lookup the database stored in the respective financial folder.
How complicated is that, why go through this multi-stage process of creating a temporary file when from a single folder/file you can produce the same report directly. For myself, I wouldn’t have a clue how to generate a temporary file or produce a report from it, what programmes do you need to achieve this.
With Manager, one programme, one folder/file, one report - would could be simpler
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