Fiscal Year Setup

Setting up your Fiscal Year in DDI Connect (FW04)

Designating a fiscal-year structure enables your organization to compartmentalize the transactions of its general ledger into different financial years. Each of these fiscal years may, in turn, be further broken up into a number of smaller periods, providing an additional layer of categorization and control over transactional data. Fiscal years and periods can, of course, also be closed to subsequent posting activity at a certain point. This gives you the ability to define financial containers or “buckets” however is most meaningful to your organization.

New FundWriter users must designate the structure of their fiscal years, including their duration and the number of accounting periods they will contain.

To set up your Fiscal Year:

• From the DDI Connect main menu, double-click FundWriter

• Double-click FundWriter Setup

• Double-click Fiscal Year Setup. You will see this screen:

You will want to configure the following:

Field	Description
Fiscal Year	The system will default this to the current year. You can change the year by either clicking in the field and typing the year, or by clicking the up or down arrows to adjust
Entity	If your organization supports multiple entities, you would click the drop down arrow in this field to select the entity you are configuring
Number of periods	Enter the number of periods (months, for example) that you have in your fiscal year. This number defaults to 12, but you can establish up to 13 accounting periods, and as few as 1
Lock approved budget	There are two budgets (fixed and working) for a given fiscal year, with the name for each defined in FundWriter Setup (FW01). For information on setting up your FundWriter, reference this screen: FundWriter Setup. For information on setting up your budgets, reference this screen: Load Budget Spreadsheets It is the fixed budget that can be locked in Fiscal Year Setup, meaning that it can no longer be updated. Users can only directly update the working budget. If the fixed budget is not locked, changes to the working budget are also applied to the fixed budget so that they remain identical. Once the fixed budget is locked, only the working budget may be changed. These changes are logged (user who made the change, date of the change, and a reason the change was made) if the "Log all changes…" option below has been selected. NOTE: There is normally no budget yet when a new fiscal year is being established. Later, after the budget has been finalized, an authorized user typically returns to Fiscal Year Setup and locks the budget.
Current Period	When you are first setting up your fiscal year, this field defaults to "1". You can change the number to reflect the current period. For example, if you are on a calendar year and it is June, you might wish to set the current period to 6
Log all changes to the chart of accounts	De-selecting this checkbox indicates that changes to the chart of accounts for this fiscal year will not be recorded and retained for future reference. A history of such changes is accessible using the History toolbar button or by running the Chart Maintenance Report (FW39). For information on the Chart Maintenance Report, reference this screen: Chart Maintenance Report (FW39) NOTE: If you de-select the Log all changes to the chart of accounts checkbox, the following message displays: “The system’s ability to track Chart of Account changes has been disabled. To reactivate, mark the box: ‘Log all changes to the chart of accounts’”.
Start Date	To set up your accounting, periods, click in the Start date field for row 1 and enter the beginning date for the period. For example, if you are on a calendar year, you would enter 01/01/XXXX for the start date. Press the tab key - the system will now populate the rest of the accounting periods based on the start date. If you have entered an odd number of periods, however, (such as 5), the starting and ending dates remain blank and you must enter them by hand
Use 13th accounting period for year end adjustment only	If your organization uses 13 months in the fiscal year, the system will display this message. If you wish to use the 13th month as an adjustment period only, check this box

When you have made your modifications, click Save.