Please consider locking transactions further to individual bank/cash accounts or allowing a certain role to change transactions. e.g. Adviser or Administrator.
I’m asking because of the following circumstances:
Accidents or mistakes happen. Administrator or certain role might need to enter/update transaction(s) to a certain account but would like to change the lock date without risking other accounts get modified/entered during this process.
Currently the locking mechanism works by preventing users to change transactions on all accounts before the lock date. This mostly used to close transactions to certain financial period.
Our office updates the lock date weekly after an audit to prevent people making mistakes or changing the data purposefully with bad intention. As we have 2 locations, our cash accounts on each locations would be audited on different dates. We prefer to be able to lock the account to certain date after the audit but still allow other accounts to be updated. During an audit of the other account, one or more transactions might need an update.
Perhaps there are other solution to these scenarios.
I think what you are asking is for is more fine-tuned control over which bank/cash accounts are locked?
Probably the best way to handle this would be with an internal process, much like how you already have an internal process to continually update the lock date as part of the weekly audit.
If an administrator needs to update a locked transaction, make sure they follow a process, for example:
Manually record current lock date
Clear lock date
Edit the transaction they need to update
Restore lock date as per Step 1
This way, accounts will be unlocked for the minimum amount of time.
As you mentioned above, this is likely the main purpose behind the lock date’s existence. In that scenario, you would always want it to lock every account and every transaction before the given date.
It sounds like you’re using the lock date feature for a purpose it wasn’t necessarily designed for … so you’re going to run into some limitations as a result.
@ShaneAU is correct. The lock date is meant to preserve data after books have been closed for a financial period, taxes filed, financial statements filed, and so forth, so that in the event of a future audit records are identical to what they were when those events occurred. It was never meant to be turned on and off on a regular basis as a fraud prevention measure. If you are going to use it that way, you need a procedure for denying access to non-administrators during the unlocked period.
Option 1; Specific date given for lock date ( date selection is manual everytime)
Option 2: we set auto lock date setup to 3 days back ( number of days can be given by user/admin).
for ex:
if i give 2 days in auto lock date
Then on 12th jan 2018 all users can edit from 10th jan 2018 but not before it.
and then the day changes to 13th jan 2018 and lock date also changes automatically to 11th jan 2018
My personal opinion is that Lock Date use should be reserved for closed financial periods. This is the same thought I expressed last September. Monthly, quarterly, or annual closeouts can take variable amounts of time, even for a given company, due to changes in workload, outside events, etc. And part of closeout should include review of transactions for completeness and accuracy. So I don’t think the feature should ever be automatic. And in multi-user environments, you can already control who can set it.
in sales invoice we have option either choose discount in percentage or exact amount
same like that its good if we have option either keep it automatic or set it manual everytime we need to change date.
if there are many users in a company, its hard to control any user to stop them from editing old transactions.
We dont know which transaction was edited by which user exactly and dont know what they edited by mistake. You can also say i can give view, create right only but no edit. but few users need edit option to do few changes and might do mistakes or do changes with wrong intentions.
Instead of this if we have both automatic and manual lock dates we can use whatever we need according to situation.
No matter what you do, whoever has permission to disable the lock date will be able to make mistakes or commit fraud. That is why a lock date should only be set after thorough management review and, as appropriate, audit. If someone is not trusted, they should not have permission. Mistakes will happen; audits will find them. Fraud may happen; it should cause you to terminate the employee or further restrict their permissions.
Manager is a tool like any other. If you let someone without training and verification of knowledge run a powerful machine, the chances are good someone will be injured. If you let someone without appropriate levels of training and trust run your accounting, your records will be compromised. Automatic lock dates will lead to a false sense of security. Managers will stop reviewing and auditing because they believe the automatic lock protects the records, but it doesn’t.
