FIACCT 02-04_10 General accounting- Monthend closing-transactions

Effective: March 16, 1998
Revised: September 1, 2006
Reviewed: February 1, 2010

Purpose

This policy provides instructions for entering and approving transactions during the monthend process.

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Background

The fiscal accounting year is divided into 12 monthly accounting periods. An additional 13th month accounting period is used for yearend adjustments. Accounting periods are designated in the FMFY format (fiscal month fiscal year) by the number of the month in the fiscal year and the fiscal year; for example 0209 is August 2009 and 1110 is May 2010.

For each month’s accounting information and reports to be meaningful, it is desirable to have as many of the financial transactions that relate to a month be posted to that month. In order to accomplish this, the month is held open for posting transactions until the first Friday after the end of the month, unless that is the first day of the month. In that case, the monthend will run on the second Friday of the month. The month will be closed, tables and ledgers will be updated and purged, and reports will be produced. Transactions may not be posted to a month once it is closed.

Each transaction has a Transaction Date field and a FM/FY field on it. Normally, you may leave these fields blank and the system will fill them in with the date that the transaction is entered and post to that month. But when you are entering new transactions during the first working day after the end of the month that you want to have posted to the prior month, you must always manually enter the FMFY date for the prior month. In addition, Inter-Agency Transactions (IATs) must have the buyer approvals.

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Procedures