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)
Please login or register to join the discussion.
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!
Agreed
If you are referring to the desktop version you can change the date in preferences and all subsequent reports will reflect that.
Captain
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.
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
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).
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?
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.
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.
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.