Year End Closing... NOT!

It's been a quiet, quiet few weeks over on this blog, but trust me, it's not because I have forgotten about you out there, but rather because my work load has increased over the past weeks, overseeing 5 projects (3 of which are going live in the next few weeks), ramping up some new IntellPartners ventures - more on that later - and welcoming new implementation challenges in South America. But that's not all... I am also gearing up for the GPUG Summit 2012 in Seattle and the Microsoft Dynamics GP Technical Airlift 2012 in Fargo, North Dakota.

However, and despite the hectic schedule, I wanted to bring to your attention a case that I had a chance to work on recently. This was for one of my clients here in Atlanta with manufacturing facilities in China. My client hosts Microsoft Dynamics GP here in their Atlanta headquarters and provide Citrix access to their subsidiaries in China to enter information into the Chinese company database. Things move at a different pace there so the office in China just got around closing the 2011 year. The accounting department quickly noticed that all beginning balances for 2012 where zeroed out - including all asset accounts.

Of course, the immediate questions came to mind.

1. Did you follow KB article 888003 - Year-end closing procedures for General Ledger in Microsoft Dynamics GP. Upon close inspection of the fiscal periods configuration, it was noted that 2011 did not appear to have been closed, this is, the year was still not marked as historic.

2. Can you run a trial balance as of December 31, 2011? After running a summary trial balance as of December 31, 2011, things appeared even more puzzling. The following is a result of that trial balance (some names have been obfuscated to protect the innocent).

Trial Balance Report

The trial balanced showed all accounts - except for a few - with zero ending balances.

3. The next question at hand was simply, when did you noticed this and what changes or entries have been posted in your system lately?

After some back and forth with the Chinese accountants, it was noted that they posted "couple entries" to "close the year". A few SQL queries later and we found the culprits causing the balances to net out to zero. We removed the journals and ran a reconcile on year 2011 and we were back in business.

This time around, the accounting staff in Atlanta executed the year-end closing procedures and all balances rolled forward as expected and everyone left home just on time to beat rush hour traffic. An ensuing memo is awaiting the Chinese staff with the proper year-end closing procedures.


Until next post!

MG.-
Mariano Gomez, MVP
IntellPartners, LLC
http://www.IntellPartners.com/