Entering Journals for a Prior/Future Period

Prior Period

• You can post journal entries to a prior accounting period, as well as to a prior fiscal year, as long as the prior period is open. When you post to a prior period, GL automatically updates the beginning balances of all subsequent periods. In addition, if you post a journal entry into a prior year, General Ledger adjusts your retained earnings balance for the effect on your income and expense accounts.
• Enter and post prior period journal entries just like any other journal entry. To ensure complete control over prior period adjustments, you can only post journal entries to an open period. When you finalize your activity for an accounting period, simply close the period to prevent the entry or posting of additional journal entries.
• To ensure that you don’t accidentally enter a journal for a prior period, choose to have General Ledger display a message whenever you try to enter a prior period journal. To use this feature, have your system administrator set the user profile option Journals: Enable Prior Period Notification to Yes.
• If there are many open accounting periods following the period to which you are posting, General Ledger must update many beginning balances. Therefore, to speed up the posting process, keep a minimum number of accounting periods open.
• It is recommended that you run a Trial Balance Report whenever you post to a previous fiscal year to ensure that your Retained Earnings account is properly reconciled. General Ledger automatically updates this account whenever you open the first period of a new fiscal year.

Future Period

• You can enter journal entries for as many future periods as you want. For example, you might want to enter journal entries for the following month while you are closing the books for the current month. You control the number of future accounting periods for which you want to allow journal entry when you define your set of books. GL automatically assigns a status of ”Future–Entry” to the appropriate number of accounting periods following the latest open accounting period in your calendar.
• Although you can enter journal transactions to any accounting period with the status of Future–Entry, you cannot post journals into a period until you open the period.