Accounting settings overview

By configuring your accounting settings, your organization can streamline financial reporting, ensure accurate tracking, and adapt to unique business needs.

Accessing Accounting Settings

You access Accounting Settings from the Accounts module menu. From here you can:

  • Configure your fiscal year start and end months.
  • Manage and configure user defined accounting periods.
  • Define accounting period names.

Configure the fiscal year

A fiscal year is a period a company or government uses for accounting purposes. A fiscal year may or may not be the same as a calendar year.

  1. Choose the first month of your organization's fiscal year. For many public and government organizations, this is July. For federal agencies October, and for most businesses, January or February. This month is used in reports and charts.
  2. Choose how your organization labels the fiscal year. 

Most organizations label the fiscal year based on the end month.

Account Settings

Examples

Ends rule example

A university's July 2019 to June 2020 fiscal year is labeled FY20.

Begins rule example

A retailer's February 2019 to January 2020 fiscal year is labeled FY19.

Calendarization method

The calendarization method lets you create user-defined calendar periods. After choosing user-defined periods for your calendarization method remember to configure the new date ranges in the spreadsheet.

It's important to remember when switching back to the default calendar month method, to reset the accounting calendar by deleting your user-defined periods.

If you plan to submit data to ENERGY STAR your calendarization method must be by calendar month and your number of accounting periods must be 12.

Account Settings

Accounting period names

Accounting periods offer an additional way to track and report bills, separate from billing periods.

Why use accounting periods?

  • Billing period = when the energy was used
  • Accounting period = When the bill was paid or posted to the financial system

Using both lets you report bills based on use and financial activity, depending on your reporting needs.

You can use Accounting period names to change the default UtilityManagement names to match your company's names.

The accounting period is not assigned automatically.

  • Enter it during manual bill entry.
  • Add to the bill import file.

Accounting period name

The accounting period name is displayed on bills and reports.

Accounting period number

The accounting period number is used for bill import.

Only certain roles can manage Accounting Settings.

Permissions

A report of user roles and their permissions is available for download on the Users and Roles page.

Custom user roles are created by administrators.