It's that time of year again, when you need to close the year in Dynamics SL. In this post, I am going to go through the different steps that you will want to take, and allow you to compile a good list of what you will want to balance out before you close.
To begin, year end is probably a good time for your IT staff to test the back ups to make sure they are working. You always hear the stories about someone who'd taken back ups for years, but when they need to restore to a prior year, they find that the equipment is outdated, or the back ups didn't work. Back ups are very important. This is a good time to test them out to make sure they're working. After testing, make sure you do a back up before closing the year. This is critical - and can not be said often enough. Before doing anything - make a back up
General Ledger. Complete the posting and closing procedures. Do some modules first. Once you've done the sub modules, go through the post transactions and make sure everything is posted. There's a couple of reports that you can run. Back in the older days, they recommended running and keeping a paper copy. I'm not so much of a proponent of that, because you can always go back and rerun these reports. Make sure you're right and things look okay to you. Make sure that you don't have any unreleased batches out there. Lots of times, someone might put a batch in, and they can leave it on hold and forget about it. It might be important, it might not be. Sometimes they'll enter it again, and now you've got two batches with the same information. It's good to go through and review all the batches that are on hold or unreleased or even suspended. It's a possibility you might have a suspended batch that you didn't realize.
Accounts Receivable. I think the key thing in accounts receivable here is to make sure everything's been entered and all your batches have been cleaned up. Make sure there's nothing on hold, nothing suspended. Make sure everything's all released. They suggest using the period sensitive report to compare it to your general ledger balance. The total should match the total of your AR accounts that you use. If they don't, the easy way to reconcile that is to look in your general ledger, if you're using quick query, you can go in there and look for any batches to that account that do not come from AR. Typically, if there's a journal entry done from GL, it'll pop right out. You'll recognize it or possibly remember the situation.
Accounts Payable is very similar to accounts receivable. You want to make sure everything is in, released, posted. There's no batches that are out there hanging out, that don't belong. Post everything again the period sensitive aged AP report should tie to your AP balances in your GL trial balance. Again, if they don't equal the best way, in our opinion, is to go run a report or use quick query to look for anything going into AP account that does not come from accounts payable. Again, there's general ledger of transactions that was entered, it will pop right out. You should recognize it.
1099. As we approach the end of the calendar year, it's time to get prepared for processing 1099's. In the AP set up screen there's a tab in there where you set the limit, it's been six hundred dollars for a long time, so we'll assume that once you've got that set you don't need to change that. Review your vendors to determine that they're properly set up. So, your 1099 vendors if you in there, there's a tab that has the tax payer identification number. You can enter that in there, make sure it's in there. And then there's a report here. The 1099 preview, which will show you all vendors that have a 1099 balance. Which it means when they entered the transaction, they had a default box pop in there or they selected a box for a 1099.