Closing a period

Closing a period stops transactions dated on or before a chosen date from being created, edited or deleted. It is what makes a set of figures final: a report you ran last month still gives the same answer today.

Lock scopes

You do not have to lock everything at once. A lock applies to one of:

This lets you close sales for the month while purchases are still being entered, which is how most teams actually work.

Soft and hard

A soft lock can be overridden by someone with the transaction lock permission. The transaction still posts, and it is recorded in the exceptions report so nobody has to discover it later.

A hard lock cannot be overridden by anyone. The period is closed. To post into it, the lock has to be released first, and releasing it is audited and requires a reason.

Use soft locks while you are still finishing a period, and hard locks once the figures have gone to an accountant or a tax authority.

Scheduling a close

You can set a lock to take effect on a future date. This is the normal way to close: "sales close on the 5th of next month" is a decision you make now, not something anyone has to remember to do.

Before a scheduled lock takes effect, Upscale notifies the people who can still post into the period, so they know to finish what they are working on. The warning goes out a few days ahead by default, and you can change how many.

The readiness check

Before you commit to a close, Upscale reports what stands in the way. Blockers stop the close; warnings are surfaced but do not.

Typical findings:

• draft documents dated in the period that were never posted
• negative stock, which makes inventory valuation and therefore cost of sales wrong
• an account balance that has not been reconciled
• foreign currency balances that have not been revalued

Reviewing this before locking is cheaper than discovering it afterwards, since a hard lock has to be released and re-applied.

Re-opening part of a closed period

Sometimes one late document has to go into a period that is otherwise closed: a bank fee that arrived after the fact, a correction an accountant asked for.

A partial unlock re-opens a specific date range inside a lock, with an expiry. When the expiry passes, the period re-hardens automatically. Nobody has to remember to close it again, which is the usual reason a temporarily re-opened period stays open for months.

The exceptions report

Every posting made into a locked period is recorded: what was posted, by whom, when, and against which lock. The exceptions report is the list.

This is the report an auditor asks for, and the reason a soft lock is useful rather than merely weak. It permits the late entry and makes it visible, instead of forcing people to work around the system.

Reconciliation and closing

Completing a bank reconciliation offers to lock that period for banking. A period that is both reconciled and locked is the strongest state your books reach: the figure the bank confirmed, sealed against later change.