Changing the Fiscal year in Lawson

HI.. Has anyone had to change their Fiscal year in Lawson? Can you give me some tips on this process?

We are investigating this process because we may need to do this so we are in sync with our corporate office.
Based on the documentation that I found on Infor Knowledge base it looks like everyone needs to be off the system and any schedule jobs need to be stopped while programs GL500, GL320, are running.
Just wondering is this is really true? How long did this process take to do?

Thanks

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Comments

lbecker

We never actually did this, but I had to research it. The VP required a 'short fiscal year', which Lawson doesn't support. In the end, we just dropped the idea altogether.

Everyone needs to be off in the sense that nobody can post anything to GL, and there will inevitably be somebody who says "I didn't think this would..." So YES, everybody needs to be off the system.

The only way to know how long it takes for you is to clone your entire system and give it a try. Given the potential for serious problems, I recommend doing a dry run anyway, and I bet Infor does, too.

You could get a rough guess on the time needed by doing a rngdbdump on GLTRANS for one fiscal year on one company. Multiply the number of years and companies to convert.

unknown

Thanks Jack!

unknown

Hi Lisa - did you end up changing your fiscal year? If so, could you share any learns that you had from the process?

thanks,

Mary

unknown

Yes we did .... but we wanted to retain the Fiscal year for the history and not restate it to match the new FY so we didn't fun GL500.

To do this we had to copy our current companies to new companies and that became our historical company so it could preserve the old FY calendar (can't have 2 different FY calendars in same company). Then copy back the historical company structure and adjust the calendars.

Then you had to make AP and IC calendars spread out so that it still reflects 12 months. Ours old FY ended June 30th so the last 7 months of 2016 reflected the last 7 days in June. Make sure to make this change before those dates arrive.

By doing all this we lost the ability to do drill around for the history because the new historical company doesn't match the other subsystems. Also MM280 no longer works for history.

You had to put back our recurring journal entries, budget, Inter-company entries and upload beginning balances from historical company to new FY company once they closed the old FY year.

If you have any interfaces based on company you would have to adjust them to point to historical for the last period of Fiscal year so you can pull data one last time.

We had a Lawson GL Consultant doing most of Lawson work with me doing the uploads or programming. There were some paint screens needed to change the GL System flags and calendar. Since this touches other subsystems we needed help from Lawson support for IC changes.

We ran into some issues when we had to close some of the subsystems for the first period in our new Fiscal year.

I'm very glad I didn't try to do this on my own!

unknown

Thanks for the insight. We're exploring some different options and want to know what other clients have done before we start down a path.

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