Changing fiscal year question

[CathodeRay]

We would like to change our fiscal year from 12/31 to 6/30. Specifically, we are now in December, the end of our 2006 year. We want to be able to end 2006 on 12/31, but start 2007 on 1/1, and end it on 6/30.

Can we just create the 2007 fiscal periods with 6 periods ending on 6/30?

And what are the ramifications if, come June 2007, we needed to continue on with a 12/31 year-end... Could we just "extend" 2007 for 6 more periods? Or would we be locked in to those 6 periods?

Or... looking at it the other way, what if we set up 2007 with 12 periods, then come, say March, decided that we did want to stop on June30. Would we be boxed in there?

 

[VictoriaYudin]

There is no problem setting up a 12 month 2007 now and later changing it to 6 months or setting it up with 6 months now and changing to 12 months later. I would set it up now to whatever is more likely to happen given the information you have now.

When you change fiscal year setup the system will tell you to run reconcile. I would probably run check links as well....so other than a little time to run these when you decide to change, no big deal there.

Hope that helps,
Victoria

 

[CathodeRay]

Thank you for the response..... will do.

 

[barbola]

You will run into problems with FRx. If you run a report using both 2006 and 2007, and you want period 7-12 from 2006, and these periods do not exist for 2006, you will get an error. I believe this is an FRx issue and haven't gotten a good answer in nearly 5 years of having problems with this.

If anyone can find a way around this please share as I have run into this problem over and over again. The only way I found that works is to create a new company database with 12 periods ending June 30 and leave the first six months closed with no activity. But I only do this if there is a change in ownership.

 

[VictoriaYudin]

Good point, I didn't think of FRx! Can't you get around the problem in FRx by hard coding the fiscal periods for the two years affected? Yes, this may take some work, especially if you have a lot of reports, but to me this is preferable to creating a new company in GP. I think it's reasonable to assume there will be some reporting changes when you change your fiscal year, especially if you create a 6 month year.

 

[CathodeRay]

Thanks for the brain cycles, friends...

But I'm a bit confused, maybe for no reason. If 2006 was left as is, that is, periods 1-12 Jan-Dec, and 2007 was set as 1-6 Jan-Jun... then if we ran an FRx comparison report for period 1, it would work as expected,right (It would compare Jan 2006 to Jan 2007)? Only if we ran a comparison report for periods 7-12 would there be a problem, yes?

If so, then I think that problem, in our case, would solve itself. that is, simply, there ARE no periods 7-12 in 2007. Correct?

 

[VictoriaYudin]

Exactly what I was thinking. Unless you have a LOT of FRx reports and would need a lot of comparative reports for the months in questions, this is probably not a big problem.

 

[barbola]

I have reports with columns for specific companies and specific hard-coded periods and years.

I still get the send-balance-filters error just because one column for one company needs period 8 and there is no period 8 in another company in another column. I don't know why, it just works that way. If your default period is Company A period 8, you get the error because period 8 doesn't exist in Company B. Even if you specify "use period Dates" vs numbers.

You won't be able to use company B as the default because there is no period 8, and then the columns for Company A would be blank. It just doesn't work so for this one company, I had to hard code it's numbers into the row format and create separate reports.

If it works for you, great. I've had to recreate reports from scratch (vendor's solution) to no avail.

 

[CathodeRay]

Yep... Nobody said it would be easy. These things do get complicated, don't they?

Thanks for the feedback. Our scenario is fairly simple, so I think we're good to go... hopefully your detailed info will help others as well.

 

[VictoriaYudin]

Barbola, I think this is a situation specific to your setup where you have multiple companies and different fiscal periods and on top of that you're putting different companies in columns side by side. I am not saying you're the only company that does reporting this way, but this is not the typical scenario that I have come across.

But it's good to know this is a limitation in FRx. I have done some pretty complicated reports in FRx, but never ones with different length fiscal year, so I didn't know this was an issue.