When attempting to create a new year, an error appears indicating that the Retained Earnings account for Dept XXX is invalid. The departments referred to in this message are those that are inactive. When making the departments active, the creation of the new year is successful. Is this normal? Once the new year is created, the departments need to be changed back to not active.

Lars:

I would suspect this is normal. Normally I would think the exoectation is that a department would not be made inactive until after the last year end in which transactions were posted.