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Slide notes: At Accounting Controls, from the Manage menu, we find the Period wizard.

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Slide notes: The Period wizard leads to all the functions to manage Financial Periods in the Business Datamart. There are separate functions for a number of Period Management aspects, and we will now look at the Main Period Control record.

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Slide notes: The system always reminds us to pay specific attention to the 'real' settings of Periods, which can affect Asset Depreciation and other period bound functions.

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Slide notes: The Main Period record has a Financial Period description, usually a Year, and a Description for the current such Main Period, for example the name of the Financial Year.

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Slide notes: The Current Active Period is indicated, but cannot be changed here. The Active Period is a Sub Period of the Main Period, and typically the Sub Periods are Months that we refer to as Financial Periods. The Active Period is the default Posting Period for current Transactions.

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Slide notes: The Main Period always starts and ends with a Sub Period or Financial Period like a Month, and we select those here on the Main Record. We can change it at any time, and the start and end Periods we use here for the Main Period will of course influence the default Periods that come up when we do a Period lookup anywhere in the system, because the first default is always to offer the current Year's Financial Periods. Usually, we will change the start and end Periods, as well as the Description, when we start a new Financial Year.

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Slide notes: Even when we use a 13th Period, we will usually choose to indicate the 12th Monthly Period as the end of the Financial Year on these settings, because when we perform Year End functions like Adjustments, Journals and Reports, we can always choose to include the 13th Period.

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Slide notes: The interpretation of P&L is an advanced feature that is ONLY used when there is a lag on our Year End processing. During this lag, i.e. while already in the New Year but not having finished the prior Year, we may choose to have this setting at "y".

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Slide notes: The Help for this prompt explains it, and this is a capability to dynamically interpret current Budgets and Balances in a New Year by discounting prior year closings that have not yet been performed. If used at all, then the setting should be returned to "n" as soon as prior Year End has been completed.

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Slide notes: When we set up a new system, the Periods always start with 1 and increment by 1 for each next Period. Of course, we can denote any number of Periods for History when we start with the system, and typically we would reserve 1 or 2 Years for history, then start using the system for live Transaction Processing at Period 27. These Period Numbers cannot be changed, but the Description that we attach to them can. So in this example, we see the system starting with Period number 2, which means that Period number 1 has been archived or rolled out, meaning it is no longer on-line. We can keep Periods on-line for as long as we choose to do so.

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Slide notes: We also see a number of Periods here that are in FIXED status, which means that they are fully audited and final Periods that cannot be opened for further Posting again. We can choose when to FIX Periods.

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Slide notes: Note in our example also that we are using 13th Periods at the end of each Financial Year for Year End closings and adjustments. This is an optional but recommended policy.

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Slide notes: Now we note that in the 'real' column, a 13th Period is always set to "n", because a 13th Period is not a REAL Period in the sense of, for example, the calculation of Asset Depreciation, because this Period should be skipped when performing Asset Depreciation.

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Slide notes: And we can also see that at the end of our current Main Period record, we have Periods running up to number 125, which in our system is called 'June 2011', and the last Period on the list never has an END date. The reason for this is that we cannot specify an END date for any Period, i.e. we can only specify the START date of a Period, and the END date is derived by the system and is always the day just before the START date of the next Period. We can generate future Periods at any time and as far into the future as we wish.

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Slide notes: Here we can see that at any time we can have multiple Periods in various states, i.e. Fixed, Open or Closed. A Period that is Open may be closed and a Period that is Closed may be Opened, but a Period that is Fixed cannot be changed, and can only stay Fixed or be archived, i.e. rolled out.

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Slide notes: In the other Tutorials for Period Management, we will see how we can perform the functions that we cannot do on the Main record screen.