Year-end closing

Year-end closing is vital for maintaining financial accuracy, complying with regulations, making informed decisions, and ensuring transparency in reporting.

Fiscal years

By default, the fiscal year is set to last 12 months and end on December 31st. However, its duration and end date can vary due to cultural, administrative, and economic considerations.

To modify these values, go to Accounting ‣ Configuration ‣ Settings. Under the Fiscal Periods section, change the Last Day field if necessary.

If the period lasts more than or less than 12 months, enable Fiscal Years and Save. Go back to the Fiscal Periods section and click ➜ Fiscal Years. From there, click Create, give it a Name, and both a Start Date and End Date.

Note

Once the set fiscal period is over, Juniper automatically reverts to the default periodicity, taking into account the value specified in the Last Day field.

Year-end checklist

Before closure

Before closing a fiscal year, ensure first everything is accurate and up-to-date:

Closing a fiscal year

Then, to close the fiscal year:

  • Run a tax report, and verify that all tax information is correct.

  • Reconcile all accounts on the balance sheet:

    • Update the bank balances in Juniper according to the actual balances found on the bank statements.

    • Reconcile all transactions in the cash and bank accounts by running the aged receivables and aged payables reports.

    • Audit all accounts, being sure to fully understand all transactions and their nature, making sure to include loans and fixed assets.

    • Optionally, run payments matching to validate any open vendor bills and customer invoices with their payments. While this step is optional, it could assist the year-end closing process if all outstanding payments and invoices are reconciled, potentially finding errors or mistakes in the system.

Next, the accountant likely verifies balance sheet items and book entries for:

  • year-end manual adjustments,

  • work in progress,

  • depreciation journal entries,

  • loans,

  • tax adjustments,

  • etc.

If the accountant is going through the year-end audit, they may want to have paper copies of all balance sheet items (such as loans, bank accounts, prepayments, sales tax statements, etc.) to compare these with the balances in Juniper.

Tip

During this process, it is good practice to set a Journal Entries Lock Date to the last day (inclusive) of the preceding fiscal year by going to Accounting ‣ Accounting ‣ Lock Dates. This way, the accountant can be confident that nobody changes the transactions while auditing the books. Users from the advisor access group can still create and modify entries.

Current year’s earnings

Juniper uses a unique account type called current year’s earnings to display the amount difference between the income and expenses accounts.

Note

The chart of accounts can only contain one account of this type. By default, it is a 999999 account named Undistributed Profits/Losses.

To allocate the current year’s earnings, create a miscellaneous entry to book them to any equity account. Once done, confirm whether or not the current year’s earnings in the balance sheet is correctly reporting a balance of zero. If that is the case, set an All Users Lock Date to the last day of the fiscal year by going to Accounting ‣ Accounting ‣ Lock Dates.

Warning

Setting an All Users Lock Date is irreversible and cannot be removed.

Note

A specific year-end closing entry is optional in order to close out the profit and loss statement. The reports are created in real-time, meaning that the profit and loss statement corresponds directly with the year-end date specified in Juniper. Therefore, any time the income statement is generated, the beginning date corresponds with the beginning of the fiscal year and all account balances should equal zero.