Financial Year

The financial year is the frame your P&L lives in — Jan–Dec, Jul–Jun, whatever your jurisdiction uses. Set it before real trading; every annual report and comparison keys on it.

The posting guard#

A financial year that has ended is not a suggestion. Manual vouchers dated into a closed financial year are refused — the numbers your accountant signed and the tax office received don't quietly change because someone back-dated an entry in March. Corrections to a closed year are made in the current year with a clearly-referenced journal entry, the way auditors expect.

Practical rules#

• Date discipline beats memory. Enter vouchers with their real dates promptly; the guard exists for the rare late paper, not as a workflow.
• Year-end is a process, not a moment. See Reports & Period Close for the closing sequence — the guard is its final lock.
• If a genuinely legitimate prior-year entry must be made before the year is finalized, that's a conversation with your accountant and support — deliberately not a checkbox.