Closing fiscal year to retained earnings

Hi @Natalie Smith, just to be clear, you don't actually have to hard close or even soft close any periods in order to have the reports accurately reflect an EOY balance. The reports will automatically pull the data as if it's closed in a sort of mock close. Here is a detailed Knowledgebase on how that works:

.

The hard close functionality, which is deferred from webview at this time, only served to permanently prevent any further transactions from being posted in a designated fiscal year. It made no closing transactions/transfers of any kind. You can still soft close the periods to prevent users from being able to post to any periods/years you don't want new activity and lock down who has rights to edit those soft closed periods.

@Natalie Smith, if you check out the KB link I sent, it does indicate that the 'Trial Balance report mock closes prior year's net surplus/deficit at the beginning of the fiscal year for fund balance accounts designated as closing accounts."

I do understand the best practices aspect of this piece, for sure, and I fully support the promotion of the Idea Bank add for this, since it's currently deferred for webview. I just wanted to reassure you that your reports and account balances will not be affected by not having the option to hard close right now. The soft close, and tight internal controls around who can and can't open/close periods, should still be acceptable for audit passing – we have a great number of organizations who have never used the hard close option for over a decade or more, which is from where the deferred decision for the time being came. Again, the hard close never made any transactions/transfers of any kind to affect your account balances, it only permanently removed the ability to make any further transactions to the specific fiscal year. So I hope that gives you some peace of mind in the interim.

@Natalie Smith, totally understand your perspective! Just so I'm understanding clearly, if the hard close, however, doesn't actually make any transactions/transfers – no journal entries – what is it that you'd be looking to have show differently on your reports that the hard close gave you that doesn't show today when you run those reports for the specified fiscal year end/start dates? Thank you for this conversation and feedback!

@Jon Kalkwarf, totally understand! Due to customer feedback, the hard close option will be coming to webview in a future release! For right now, we're limited to the soft close and other options we've discussed on this thread, but it is no longer the plan to have customers depend on the mock close of reports and soft closing of periods alone. Thank you for your feedback!

@April Kulpa First half of 2025, possibly as early as Q1. Until then, your reports will update with the mock close and you can soft close to avoid additional data entry.

@Natalie Smith, yes! That functionality to hard close and run a pre-close report were released to everyone by Jan 24th. You should now see the option at the ‘header’ of the ‘Manage all fiscal years’ for ‘optimize’, ‘pre-close’, and ‘close’. If you don't see those options (and rights are good to go there) please let support know!

@Nikki Baldwin Is there a KB for pre-closing and close in NXT? Anything I read is pointing back to database veiw steps.

We started with NXT several years back and haven't hard-close a fiscal year. I think it is time I figure this out. Are actual journal entries being created in the closing process?

@Nikki Baldwin It's unclear if “optimizing” removes details like the old “summarizing” function did. If I optimize will all the details still be there? If so I'd be willing to try.

Having said that, in database, optimizing fiscal years didn't have any noticeable result for us. Will it have more of a result in WebView? It seems to me like much of the delay in running a report is in other steps: waiting for server to pick up request, queueing, etc. I'm afraid that telling customers to optimize their data is more for the benefit of Blackbaud's servers than for any of our individual sites' performance.