Hi, Sue,
I think that one definite advantage to loading GL9 prior to performing your year end is that your current year detail transactions will all be immediately available within GL9 and you would be able to take advantage of GL9's 'soft' year end.
With GL9's 'soft' year end, you are able to have a maximum of 2 years of data available to post to at any one time. This means that, in GL9, you could decide to leave your current year open longer to capture additional year end entries that might present themselves (late, stray invoices and year end adjusting entries) and also create the NextYear and begin posting to it all within the same dataset. Both year's data are now available for reporting also (eg. Detail Listing, etc.).
When you are ready, you would Close the Income & Expense Accounts for the current year and Closed the Current Fiscal Year in GL9. (Then, you would still have 2 years of data available to post to -- the current year and the prior year.)
It is true, however, that you could continue to close your current year and create the next in your old version of GL and still retrieve the prior year's transaction detail at a later date into your GL9 dataset. (Make sure you don't convert your prior year data to GL9 as the 'retrieve prior year transactions' feature runs on prior GL version data only at this time.)
Are you referring to the financial reporter not working? It works very well in GL9. I believe the problem you are referring to is one occurred for a very specific situation for a couple of clients only. Did you use a different fiscal year end last year than you are using this year? This is a more isolated situation that does not occur for the majority of users.
_________________________
Regards,
Softrak Tech Support