Closing your fiscal year, in full
What the year-end close checklist actually checks, what blocks it, and what closing actually does to your ledger.
Closing your financial year introduces the guided close in plain terms. This page covers what each checklist item actually checks, and what closing does to your accounts underneath.
Setting up fiscal years and periods
Go to Accounting → Fiscal Years. Select New Fiscal Year, enter a start and end date, and BusinessCopilot creates the year with its periods underneath. Each period can be closed individually as you finish working through it, independent of closing the whole year.
The year-end close checklist
Select Close Fiscal Year → Equity on an open year to open its checklist. Two kinds of item:
Hard gates — block closing until they're clear:
- Bank Reconciliation Status — every account's bank reconciliation is up to date.
- Uncategorized Transactions — nothing is sitting unclassified.
These are enforced by the server itself, not just the screen — even a direct request can't close over them, and the button stays disabled with an explanation while either is blocking.
Soft gates — reviewed, and acknowledgeable if you're closing over a known gap:
- Inventory Count Confirmed
- Receivables / Payables Review
For these, select Acknowledge to confirm you've reviewed the item and are choosing to close anyway — this is a judgment call a real business sometimes has to make, and BusinessCopilot records exactly what you acknowledged and when for your own audit trail, rather than silently letting it pass or blocking you outright.
What closing actually does
Selecting Close Fiscal Year → Equity posts a real, permanent journal entry that transfers your year's net income into Retained Earnings — the standard year-end close entry — and locks every still-open period in that year. If the year had zero profit-and-loss activity at all, no journal is needed and none is posted.
Once closed, you can Generate Year-End Package — a downloadable set of comparative statements for the closed year against the year before it.