Year-End Best Practices

Overview 

This article provides an overview of recommended year-end best practices to help support your year-end closing process.

Note: Click here to view our Year-End Best Practices – Part 1 webinar on-demand.

Best Practices

Year-End Close Schedule

The Year-End Close Schedule provides you with a detailed timeline that outlines all of the tasks that are required and deadlines necessary during the closing process to finalize your financial data and create financial statements for end of a fiscal year. The schedule will help you walk through each of the year-end close steps. The schedule helps to:

• Ensure compliance with financial standards
• Organize processes for efficiency and accuracy
• Reduce errors and increase confidence in financial reporting.

Accounting Period Tasks can be utilized as part of the schedule process. The Accounting Period Tasks screen is accessible from Accounting Home | Setup | Ledger | Accounting Period Tasks.

• From the list view, you can sort by Frequency to see all task frequencies that are available.
• Accounting Period Tasks can be assigned to the person who needs to perform a task.
• Notes & Files can also be attached to a task.

Preliminary Financial Statements

You want to run preliminary financial statements to make sure that the statements are aligning to your last closed period. Some of the  reports that you want to generate and review include the Profit & Loss, Balance Sheet, and Trial Balance reports to confirm that the balances align with prior closed periods. If you need assistance with generating these reports, refer to the Financial Reports – Standard Reports article.

In addition to the Standard Reports, you can also generate a Transaction Detail by GL Account Report using the Salesforce Report Generator. This report is accessible from Accounting Home | Run Reports | Management Reports | All Reports. Then, search for Transaction Detail by GL Account. This report provides a listing of all transactions by GL Account, and it can be filtered by GL and Accounting Period. Click Edit to modify information on the report that will be generated.  

Process Integrity Checks

Process Integrity Checks will help to determine that all records are accounted for in your financials. These are validations to make sure all necessary steps are followed accurately and consistently for each record. Examples of these records include the following:

• Closed/Won Opportunities
• Recurring Billings
• If you have our Orders & Inventory package installed:
  
  • • Sales orders
    • Work Orders
    • Purchase Orders.

Note: From the Salesforce Report Generator, in the All Reports section (see above), you can search for Build Opportunities to generate a report to show opportunities.

Post Transactions

This will help to confirm that all transactions for the year have been posted for Billings, Payables, and Journal Entries. You can use list views for easy review of open and unposted transactions. You will want to select a list view other than Recently Viewed. For example, from the Payables screen, you can select the Unposted list view.

Reviewing the list view will help you determine if some records are stuck in the “pending” stage and need to be moved along to completion and posted to ensure they are accounted for in your financial statements.

Reconcile All Accounts

This part of the process is where you will reconcile all Balance Sheet accounts. Some examples of accounts that should be reconciled include the following:

• Cash & Credit Cards
• Unapplied Cash
• AR and AP
• Deferred/Accrued Revenue
• Prepaid Expenses.

Note: A notable article that you might want to review is the AR & AP Reconciliation.

As a part of this process, you will want to review the Enablements screen to check applicable settings. This includes the Aging/History Enablement. If you have been using Accounting Seed for some time, the settings in this section should already be set to “On.” If you are new to Accounting Seed, you will most likely want to turn these settings “On.”

Note: If you have our Orders & Inventory package installed, you will want to turn “On” the Enable Inventory Period History setting.

There is a Cash Flow setting in the Enablements screen, which you will want to turn “On” if you plan to use a Cash Flow Statement.

Close Accounting Periods

In this part of the process, you will want to close any open Accounting Periods for the year once all reconciliations have been completed. For information on closing a period, refer to the Open and Close Accounting Periods article.  

If you need to open an existing closed Accounting Period to make year-end adjustments, from the Accounting Periods screen, select the Pencil icon on the closed period that you want to re-open. Then, click the drop-down list and select Open, and click Save.

Note: Click here to view the above image in full screen. 

Note: You might want to consider using the last day of the year for Journal Entry adjustments.

Run Financial Statements

Now, you are ready to process and prepare the final financial statements. Examples include the following:

• Balance Sheet
• Profit & Loss
• Trial Balance
• Cash Flow Statements.

If you need assistance with generating these reports, refer to the Financial Reports – Standard Reports article. Generated reports can be exported to an Excel spreadsheet or a PDF file.

Note: When generating certain reports, be aware that your Billing/Payable Posting Setting (Header Level Post or Line Level Post) will determine if GL Account Variables can be included on a report. These can only be included if Line Level Post is selected at the bottom of the Post Settings screen. Line Level Post does require more storage space than Header Level Post.

Tax Compliance

This part of the process is where you will adhere to the tax laws and regulations to report income, expenses, and other financial details to the appropriate tax authorities. This includes information such as:

• Sales Tax
• State & Federal Tax
• Payroll Tax
• 1099/98 Processing.

For more information about preparing and processing 1099 data in Accounting Seed, click here to attend our Year-End Best Practices – Part 2 webinar.

Note: Refer to your tax professional for specific guidance on tax compliance for your organization.

Overview of Resources

• Best Practices for Year-End Guide
• Year-End Best Practice Series webinars:
  
  • • Part 1 - Year-End Best Practices overview
    • Part 2 - 1099 Processing
• AR & AP Reconciliation article
• Month-End Best Practices article
• Financial Reports article

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