At any given time Spire has 3 years open that users can post to. They are Last Year, This Year and Next Year. Typically companies work in This Year but that is not a requirement. By working in This Year Spire allows you to back date and post date transactions 1 year back or 1 year forward, and maintain budgets for the subsequent year you are working in.
Once the company has finished all of its transactions for Last year, that year can be closed. You might choose to wait until close to the end of “Next Year” to close Last Year, to be able to inquire on more of the past years transactions, effectively treating “Next Year” as “This Year” with two years of historical inquiry available.
It is not possible to post transactions with dates after the year end date of Next Year. When these transactions need to be posted, you need to process Year End for Last Year. Closing this year moves all GL transactions to the historical GL tables, the other two fiscal years shift to new positions, and a new fiscal year is created as Next Year. All other tables like sales history, AR, AP etc are not closed but continue to refer to the Ledger fiscal calendars by date. During the year end closing, the sales and purchase history year to date statistics are updated in customers, vendors and inventory.
To close the year, from the top Tools menu, choose Year End. The user must have permission to run this.
To be able to perform the year end, the user must be logged into Spire with the last day of the “Last Year” fiscal calendar. If they use a different date they will see this message.
When the correct date is entered for logging into Spire, the user will receive this warning checklist message when starting Year End to make sure everything required to been done before closing the year in fact has been.
The ‘Proceed’ button will be grayed out unless the user checks all warning messages. When you are able to Proceed from this screen, Spire still checks for unreconciled transactions in all bank accounts and if any are found, a warning message appears to indicate this.
The final step of the Year End procedure is that Spire will automatically log out of the company, so that when you sign back in the fiscal calendars have been adjusted and the new year is active.