Overview: Year End and Clear Down

The Year End and Clear Down is used to perform a year end before starting each new year’s work. But it also supports some other functions.

• Year End: The Year end performs the following:
  • Nominal Ledger Accounts are closed off and their balances carried forward. The default setting is for a Nominal Ledger account to close off to itself, but there are two ways to set a different close-off account:

1. A specific close-off account can be set on a nominal account. This is usually done in the master chart, but on occasions it is useful to override the master account setting and set a close-off account at client level.
2. The second method is to define a Profit and Loss range on the Client Class. Any account in the profit and loss range closes off to the Profit Account unless the P&L account has its own close-off account specified. The Profit Account is defined in Nominal Client Details > Nominals.

• The closing balances are used to update the comparative balances, and the existing comparative balances are rolled back to pre-comparative balances.
• The new opening balances are posted as an Opening Balance journal dated on the first day of the new year.
• Perform Clear Down: The Clear Down deletes old entries to save space and speed up the system. It is rarely used these days.
  • Old entries are deleted. However the Clear Down never deletes entries in the current financial year. The user can specify the type of the entries to delete and the period for which to delete them.
  • 'Redundant' investments are deleted. This means that investments that have been sold and had no further transactions can be deleted. This function is optional.
• Change client class: There are two ways to change the chart of accounts that a client uses.

1. Globally. The chart of accounts of all clients in a client class can be changed by using options on the Master Chart. This process is documented here. In this case the client remains in the same client class, but the chart of accounts for the whole client class is changed. The accounts formatting data is unaffected. This option does not change the Format Type of a client for accounts formatting.
2. Client-level. The chart of accounts can be changed for a single client using the option Change Client Class as part of a year end. In this case, the client is moved from one Client Class to another with a different chart. A mapping file is required to map the nominal accounts from the old chart of accounts to the new one. The old client class itself is unaffected. As before, the accounts formatting data is unaffected and the  Format Type option is unchanged.

• Adopt FRS102: This option changes the client class of a Limited Company or Charity to the FRS102 client class. A mapping file is required to map to the new nominals. This option also changes the Format Type of the client to the FRS102 version. It converts the Statutory Database data to the new structure, but does not convert local accounts pages as they usually do not apply or would need to be recreated using the new named ranges. 

• As a precaution, the Year End and Clear Down option can be password protected via Activities > System Management > Maintain Passwords.