Managing the accounting period will roll all transactions that have taken place since the last time you rolled the period. For example, if you roll on the 01 February and then don't roll again until the 17 March, the system will roll all transactions between those dates, it will not just roll all transactions relating to February invoices.
Rolling the accounting period does the following:
Writes the month-end balances to the Ledger (used for generating the Aged Trial Balance report)
All invoices of status "printed" will stay with status "printed", but will no longer appear in the Invoicing screen under the Invoices tab. The invoices will still be accessible under the customer's Account in the Account List.
All invoices of status "settled" that are older than 3 months will become status "closed". An invoice with status "Closed" cannot be amended or voided, if there is an error with a closed invoice a journal must be used (in the current period) to correct the account.
Checks for any accounts set up which do not have a contact associated with them - the system integrity will not allow this. This circumstance will arise if a contact is deleted without also deleting the account. A new contact will be set up automatically, but you will be warned and you will have to open the contact screen and complete details such as address and phone numbers etc.
Prints the selected reports.
If selected, the system will check invoices/bookings before rolling. This procedure checks that values posted to invoice in the reservation is equal to the amount invoiced in the same period.
It is recommended you roll the accounts period monthly. If it has not been rolled for more than 3 months you will need to enlist the help of an IBIS technician to update your period (charges apply). Note that if you are rolling the accounts period for multiple months, it will automatically roll everything into the next sequential month (so if you roll for November, and it's March, it will roll all invoices into December). To further roll the period into the current month, you MUST untick 'Check invoices/bookings before rolling'.
Rolling the accounting period
The roll accounts function is done in the Manage Accounts Period screen found under the Accounts and Contacts menu. We recommend that you roll your accounting period at a quiet time of day, i.e. before closing. This ensures that the process does not slow down your IBIS system for other users during busy periods.
Ensure that all the invoices created have been set to status Printed. Invoices of status New will not be rolled. You can check this (and change the status) from the Manage Invoices screen.
Click the Booking/invoice agreement button which performs a pre-roll check to identify any situations where the reservation value posted to invoice does not equal the value invoiced. If you have amended any bookings in the month and forgotten to repost the changes to invoice, this message shows details of the mismatches for you to follow up i.e. the invoice number, account name, and total discrepant value.
You can override this checking mechanism by unticking 'Check invoices/bookings before rolling' at the bottom of the Manage Accounts Period window.
The Close invoices/payments older than (months) field automatically closes invoices older than the number of months specified.
Place a tick in the boxes next to the reports you want to print.
Click the Roll button. Once you have rolled the accounting period, you cannot void invoices or delete payments that have been made in that period.
There is a mechanism to stop the accounting period being accidentally into a future period. If today's date falls within the current accounting period, the system will not let you roll the accounting period forward into the next month. For example if today is December 12th and your current accounting period is December, you cannot roll the account period into January.
What happens if you don't roll your accounting period?
You may end up in a situation where your accounting period has not been rolled and is now out of date. This article explains what you should do to get it up to date, and what impact forgetting to roll the accounting period has on the system.
There are generally two scenarios for rolling the accounting period:
- As soon as possible after a month has finished, invoices are generated for the month just ended, any journals or adjustments required are generated and then the period is rolled. This scenario is most common for operators.
- After the 20th of the month payment run (when most invoices received from operators are due) the period is rolled. This scenario is most common for agents.
The aim is to roll the month at a time that results in the accounting period reports giving you a sensible 'set' of transactions. Rolling the month also gives you an accurate aged balance report which is important in minimising your outstanding accounts.
What impact does not rolling the month have?
If you miss rolling the month by a few days, then there is little impact. You may end up with some payments receipted into the wrong period, or some newly generated invoices in the wrong period.
If you miss rolling the period by longer, then you may end up with several 'sets' of accounting transactions in one period. If this happens, you will need to use the date-based accounting reports (on tab 2 in the Accounts reports screen) to see each month's transactions, rather than the period-based reports on tab 1.
Working through an example
Say your account period is in August, and it is now December. You have generated invoices and payments for several months in the intervening period. When you roll the accounting period into September, all of the invoices and payments will fall into the August period. You then need to continue to roll the accounting period until it is in the correct period, in this example the correct period is December. You will need to untick the 'Check invoices/bookings before rolling' box as there will be no invoices in these subsequent periods for the system to check. You may also want to untick any of the reports you have ticked unless you want to keep a record of the empty account periods.
If you run the aged balance for the current period (which is now December) you will see that all invoices including ones you may have generated in November, will show in the 90 days aged column because they have ended up in the August period. However, if you run a date-based report on invoices for November, you should see all of the invoices you generated with an invoice date in November (this will be the same for payments and journals).