Some information about year-end.

Year-end procedures, or "closing the books", means advancing the default year to the current year, printing special forms such as 1099 and W-2 and Contributions statements, and possibly more, depending on decisions made in your office.

For some modules, such as Accounts Receivable, you only need to close the month. In other modules, such as General Ledger,Accounts Payable, Contributions, year-end procedures can also include closing the year, mailing out forms and statements, and making year-end journal entries.

After closing the year, you can still post transactions to the previous year and print reports for those transactions. You must, however, select the Allow posting to prior periods option in General Ledger Setup.

For modules that do not have year-end procedures, the last month of the year is no different than any other month of the year. After you close the month, you can begin posting to the new month immediately. Although modules such Accounts Payable and Payroll do not have a special year-end closing, you still need to print year-end forms such as 1099 and W-2.

Make sure to back up your data frequently. You can make backups to different media, such as CD, flash drive, hard drive, or network drive. If you encounter problems that require you to restore data, your backups can save duplication of work.