Changing GL Fiscal Years

Eddy Vittini

I have a customer, who for tax reasons, needs to change his fiscal year end from September 30 to December 31. While reviewing the Tech Tip posted on Infor365 for the steps to change fiscal years it does not seem to answer my issue.

My customer has entered into Fiscal Year 2011 (by closing September) and wants to end the year "short" in December and start FY 2011 in January. This would seem to create to fiscal periods 01/2011 (one as Oct 2010 and the other as Jan 2011).

Has anyone ever done a process such as this? Am I looking at changing all prior years to be 1 year less and call the last closed fiscal year as 2009 that ended in September 2010? Then allow the "short" year of October to December 2010 to be FY 2010.

Any ideas or suggestions would be appreciated...

sjacquin

Rob, you have 2 ways to do this (2 that I use,there my be others) and one potential programming issue. 1) If you wish, you can change the "number of periods/year" in company control down to 3 (will have to "break" the code to get 3 instead of 4 into this filed). When you close out December (period 3), and finish up your journal entries, you change this back to 12. The downside of this approach is that prior year comparisons become impossible. 2) Leave the number of periods at 12. When you are closing December, close out an extra 9 times to bump you into the next year. This will allow comparisions, but of course, you will be comparing to a "short" year. Either way will leave *calendar year* 2011 as fiscal year 2012. This isn't really a problem, but if you want to change it you will have to write a program to bump all the years in the open and yearly journal files back by one year.

As an aside, we have done variations on this where we only close G/L the extra 9 times and just go in and tinker with the current period in all of the other modules. That way, IC doesn't have a big hole in usage. If this is 7.6 SA should fare just fine as well. I have not yet had to do this for 7.7, but it should be similar.