Ledger 9.0 allows postings to 2 years at any given time:
-Current Year and Prior Year or
-Current Year and Next Year (if new year has been opened).

A client has 2009 (Current) and 2010 (Next Year) both open. However he has closing entries for 2008 to enter for several datasets. Since Prior Year postings to that fiscal year are no longer available, is there any way to accomplish that?

Thank you.

Hi, Bruce,

Wow, that's going a long way back.

About all they can do are postings to 2009 and use the account notes feature to document what, why & when. This still won't fix 2008 but will affect years going forward.

Thank you Support:

I expected that answer but was hoping for a non-documented work-around.

It's unusual but not impossible that adjusting entries could be held up for a number of months.

Hi Bruce,

We understand "a couple of months". You're saying it's been longer than a year!

Bruce,

We've had this same thing happen with a few clients in the past year or so. You can make the entries to the older years by using the "Account History" function in GL's Edit menu in combination with GVRW.

Because the Account History function doesn't make changes to the next year's opening balances, a number of fields (mostly opening and closing balances) need to be updated in a few different GL tables using GVRW. If there are a lot of accounts to be updated, it can be quite a challenge to get everything in order so that it all passes DIC.

If you'd like to discuss this option, feel free to give me a call.

It seems to be not an altogether uncommon issue. If there's not some structural limitation, perhaps an ability to post back further than 1 year could be considered?

How was this handled before Ledger 90A was in use? Waiting for over a year to enter and post adjusting entries? Did they have to keep separate books for each fiscal year?

If their business is always in catch-up mode and having to wait a year for adjusting entries, perhaps they will have to forgo the multiple years of history feature in Ledger 9, and instead keep each year in separate databases to allow posting to whichever year is required. Then use Adagio FX to consolidate the amounts for financial reporting.

Or do not open the Next Year and instead Archive the batches that belong there until the Prior year entries are complete. Then create the Next Year and copy the Archive batches to Next Year, recalculating fiscal periods as required to overwrite period 99. (sound familiar from a past era...?)

It would be a very substantial change to allow posting to a prior year when the next year is open - having to do 2 year ends in the background to accommodate both the prior year and current year accounts and retained earnings as well as next year. And many other structural considerations.

Thanks for all of the replies.

Andrew:
It's not really "longer than a year" though. Under usual circumstances, an auditor takes 3 to 6 months to return their year-end adjustments. Add in some unusual circumstances and the timing is a lot tighter.

Support:
In versions prior to 9.0, users made a copy of their Ledger data and reserved it, thus allowing Prior Year entries whenever required. If the client has the same timing issue each year, your suggestion of having several copies of the data would work, though it defeats one of 9.0's greatest features.

Ryan:
I'll talk with the firm involved and see how important this is to them. Thank you for the suggestion.

Thanks for your comments.

In general, never open the Next Year until the auditor's entries are posted to prior year. If this is only 3-6 months then there is no problem. Then you can continue to take advantage of the super feature of multiple years of history in the same data set.

Update: When given his options (one of which was a billable data repair along the lines of Ryan's suggestion), the client decided to enter the 2008 postings into 2009 Period 1.

Which is what they would have had to do in the old model.