The hardest thing about creating a new year in Sage 300 ERP (Accpac) is deciding when to run the create new year process. Let’s dig into that after we go through the steps.

First, you will need to create a new year in the fiscal calendar.

Common Services > Fiscal Calendar

The fiscal calendar screen will let you map out all of the dates for the year. It defaults to a calendar year, but if your first period is not January or if you are doing a 4-4-5 to make year to year comparisons easy, this is the place where you define those dates.

After you define your calendar, you will need to run the Create New Year Process. This process only effects the General Ledger and will create closing entries to retained earnings for all of income and expense accounts.

General Ledger > G/L Period Processing > Create New Year

It gives a big scary warning to do a back up before the process. This is good advice as this process cannot be redone. However, I can honestly say, I have never seen an issue with the create New Year since Accpac for DOS was retired. An Accpac database dump makes a great backup, but also a network backup will suffice. I usually suggest to run the Create New Year process first thing in the morning before anyone else gets into Accpac and starts working. You just need a quick check with your network person to make sure the regularly scheduled nightly backup ran successfully.

Depending on your data size, it may take anywhere from 30 seconds to 30 minutes to process. Typically, it is a few minutes of churning through the data before it completes.

Now, when to run the create new year function is always the hardest decision. You can create the new fiscal calendar at anytime. Once the new year is defined in the fiscal calendar, transactions can be processed in the sub-ledgers. You will not be able to post transactions in the new year in the General Ledger until the Create New Year Process has been run. My advice is to hold of as long as you can. Ideally, you would hold off until all transactions in the previous year have been posted. Since that’s not ever realistic, holding out for as long as possible will usually be the best option. Once you run the Create New Year Process any entry to last year that hits an income statement account will automatically generate the required closing entry.   If you have lots of entries to retained earning and a fussy auditor, it could be a pain to follow them all through. It’s mostly about finding the best balance. Clicking the button is the easy part.