What’s an Accounting Period Got to Do with a Project Manager?
During the accounting period, a company gathers and organizes its financial activity. This is used to create financial statements at the close of the accounting period. The accounting period can be considered as the time taken to complete an accounting cycle of the business.
Within most professional services organizations, there is the need to associate separate accounting dates with transactions as well as financial reporting on a specific date that might differ from the transaction date.
Enter the Accounting Period Function
The Accounting Period functionality allows OpenAir users to associate an additional accounting date with a transaction. The user can then configure financial reports to leverage the accounting dates, rather than the original transaction dates. The accounting date functionality is enabled with the accounting period functionality. One does not exist without the other.
To Enable this feature, contact Support to enable the internal switch: Enable the accounting period feature to manage transaction dating
Once this switch is enabled, the following module transactions will now have an accounting date field displayed.
- Charges
- Invoices
- Receipts
- Expense Reports
- Time Entries
- Timesheets
- Revenue Recognition
To create specific accounting periods:
- Navigate to Administration > Global > Organization > Accounting Periods
- Select the create button and create a New Accounting Period
- Name the accounting period (Example: P1 2020)
- Select the start and end dates for the time periods
- Select the Active checkbox
- Click Save
* Note: One can limit the functionality of this feature with permission rules or by updating the form permissions to allow for (Required, Read Only, or Hidden) per role.
The use of accounting periods within OpenAir improves the data validation of the company’s performance through its financial statements since they are based off of a fixed period of time, rather than a month end date.
