Accounting
Accounting Periods
Your accounting is organised into periods — usually months. Periods give your books a natural rhythm: you trade through a month, review it, and then finalise it.
Locking a period
Once a period is finalised, you can lock it. After a period is locked, no new entries can be posted with a date inside that period. In other words, a closed month stays closed — nothing can slip in and change it after the fact.
Locking is an Owner or Accountant action, so control of closing months stays with the people responsible for the books.
Why closing periods matters
Locking might feel like an extra step, but it protects you:
- It protects finalised reports. Once you've reviewed a month and shared or relied on its figures, locking makes sure those figures can't quietly change later.
- It protects your tax filings. VAT and other returns are based on a specific period. Locking that period keeps the numbers you filed matching the numbers in your books.
- It prevents accidental changes. A back-dated entry — easy to create by mistake — can't land in a month you've already closed.
Think of locking as drawing a line under the month: everything before the line is settled and safe.
A simple month-end routine
- Let the month's transactions finish posting (most are automatic).
- Post any manual adjustments you need — see Journals.
- Review the Trial Balance and confirm it balances — see Reports.
- Lock the period.
If you later discover you genuinely need to change a locked month, an Owner or Accountant can decide how to handle it — but the default is that closed months stay protected.
Related
- Overview — how your books are structured.
- Journals — posting and reversing entries.
- Reports — reviewing a period before you lock it.
Last updated 2026-08-11