Quickbooks change date help

Quickbooks change date help

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Hopefully all you Quickbooks experts can help please.

One of our (new) clients has presented us with Quickbooks for his small limited company which started on 1st April 2014.

Quickbooks has been set up with a year end of 31st December but the ARD is 31st March.

The owner is a small time painter/decorator and the company turnover is only around the £29,000 mark (no....we don't know why he formed the company either but he won't shut it down). The company is not VAT registered neither does it have any employees apart from the owner himself. 

The question is this - can the year end date simply be changed in Quickbooks to 31st March, and the program will cope, or will that just mess up everything irretrievably?

The people we speak to at Quickbooks do not sound confident they know what they are taking about and we don't want to wreck our client's books. Hence my request here.

Any advice/tips/help would be much appreciated.

Replies (11)

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By catlady
09th Dec 2015 17:38

If you are using a desktop version it should be fine, although I have not done it for some time. To be on the safe side, just make a copy of the file and try it!

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By Captainblack
10th Dec 2015 07:12

Agreed

If you are referring to the desktop version you can change the date in preferences and all subsequent reports will reflect that.

Captain

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By taxinfo
10th Dec 2015 09:12

thanks but....

Yes, thanks, that's what we would do if we had a "copy" but this client has used Intuit's cloud systems. He is keeping the books on their servers and given us "accountant's access". At the moment both we and the client are working on "live" data based on those servers. We have no desktop "copy" to experiment with.

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By landscaper
10th Dec 2015 09:29

I did it

I changed it for my husband's company last year and we are floating in the cloud version.  No problems but, as with anything like that, I took 3 backups beforehand just in case it all went Pete Tong.

 

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By HeatherSimpson
10th Dec 2015 13:45

Easy to edit and should not cause problems

Hello taxinfo,

It should be fairly straightforward. I do it all the time.

Click on the cog at the top, select Company Settings, then Advanced and edit the date that the financial period starts. It will just put the reports right.

Regards

Heather

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By Charlie Carne
10th Dec 2015 18:04

Yes, you can change QBO y/e whenever you want

Both the desktop version of QuickBooks and the cloud version (QuickBooks Online - QBO) allow you to change the year-end date whenever you like. All reports will then reflect the new date. As there is no year-end procedure in QB or QBO, it won't cause any problems at all.

As Heather says, you change this in Company Settings - Advanced. Note that you need to amend the "First month of financial year" field, not the "Close the books" date. That latter date makes no difference to reporting; its sole purpose is to stop accidental changes to transactions prior to whatever date you set there (which could be the last year-end or last VAT quarter, or simply the latest date to which you've reconciled the books).

landscaper wrote:
I changed it for my husband's company last year and we are floating in the cloud version.  No problems but, as with anything like that, I took 3 backups beforehand just in case it all went Pete Tong.

I'm not sure how landscaper took a backup from the cloud version, though. When you (landscaper) say cloud, do you actually mean that they are using the desktop software hosted in an online (virtual desktop) environment?

 

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Replying to charliecarne:
By stupormundis
15th May 2017 07:22

I have tried to change a client's yearend and have gone through the process of cog>settings>advanced settings etc. However when I enter the new "First month of the year" I am not allowed to save the setting and an error message comes up.
To add to the frustration my phone calls to the helpdesk and my QB contact have been totally unhelpful and elicit a We'll escalate this followed by a deafening silence.

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Replying to stupormundis:
By Charlie Carne
16th May 2017 09:00

I find it very hard to believe that the QBO support line have not been able to answer your question. I have never found them less than very helpful and knowledgeable. And since this is such a simple problem to solve, I find it impossible to believe that they were unable to help you if you asked the right question.

It would, BTW, be helpful if posters to this forum stated whether they were using QBO (QuickBooks Online) or QuickBooks Desktop, as they are entirely different programs.

On the assumption that you are using QBO, it is very easy to change the year-end unless you do not have permission to do so. stupormundis, do you know what access rights you have? Go to menu - manage users and you will see if you have company admin rights. If not, then you will need to ask your client to change your user settings.

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By taxinfo
11th Dec 2015 09:56

Thank you all

...........for your sage (no pun intended) words of experience. Much appreciated.

It gives us confidence that we know what we are doing now despite what Intuit/QB staff say is, or is not, possible.

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By taxinfo
15th Dec 2015 19:01

The change of ARD went OK without disrupting anything BUT another issue has now cropped up.

This new client has set up Quickbooks on the "cash basis" option but we need it to be on the accruals basis.

The way the client has used Quickbooks is causing us no end of grief trying to reconcile items. For example, we cannot find the debtors account but that's probably because it's set to the cash basis. 

We can see items in the sales account. However, under the column "split", it says debtors but we cannot find the debtor entries.

Given our recent track record receiving suspect advice from the Intuit QB "helpline" may we please ask for some further help from you QB experts out there?

If we go into settings > company can we just flip the switch from cash basis to accruals basis without wrecking anything?

If we can flip the accounts to accruals basis will that reveal the hidden debtors account?

Is there any other way to find the double entry for an individual transaction?

Many thanks for your help.

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Scalloway Castle
By scalloway
15th Dec 2015 21:24

Reports

If the problem is in presenting reports it should be possible to set an option to switch to accruals without affecting the underlying data. I no longer have Quickbooks installed so I can't give you chapter and verse but my recollection is that it is an option in each report. I think you can also change it in Company Preferences.

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