Period close & year end

Once a period is reported on — a VAT return filed, accounts handed to your accountant, a year submitted — the records behind those figures should stop moving. Accounting → Period Close is where you make that so. It is an owner and admin area: other roles see an access-restricted notice, because shutting a business's history is a decision for whoever answers for it.

Locking a period

The Period lock card shows where you stand: either every date in your history is still open, or everything on or before a stated day is closed. There is one lock per organisation — a single date, which you move forward as periods settle.

Pick a day and click Lock the books (or Move the lock, if one is already standing). Locking shuts every date on or before the day you pick — the day itself is closed, not the day before it. Before you commit, the confirmation shows how many posted journal entries the lock would cover, so you know the size of what you are shutting. PulseBooks also suggests a lock when it can see one is due — after you file a VAT return, or when a finished period has sat unlocked for a while — but the suggestion is only ever a pre-filled date; the confirmation still stands between you and the lock.

A lock is deliberately narrow in what it does:

• It changes nothing already in your books — no entry is edited, moved or removed.
• It applies to everyone: your whole team, and any AI assistant connected over MCP.
• It is not permanent. An owner or admin can move the date or click Unlock everything at any time.

What a locked period rejects

Anything dated on or before the lock cannot be added, changed or removed. Editing an expense, deleting a transaction, recording a back-dated payment — each is refused with a message naming the locked date. To correct something in a locked period without moving the lock, post the correction on an open date: a reversing journal entry is dated today for exactly this reason, and an invoice mistake is handled with a credit note dated now.

Reading is never locked. Locked periods still appear in every report, journals in them can still be opened and inspected, and your accountant can still work through the history — the lock stops the past from changing, not from being seen.

Closing a financial year

The Year end section lists your financial years, following the financial year start month in your organisation settings. A year can be closed once it is over, and years close oldest first.

Closing a year posts one journal entry that zeroes every income and expense account for the year and lands the difference — the year's profit or loss — in the Retained Earnings system account, where accumulated profit from closed years lives. It then locks the books through the year end. The entry carries both accounting bases, accrual and cash, and the confirmation shows both net profit figures before you commit.

Your balance sheet will not move when you close: retained earnings already counts an unclosed year's profit. The close simply makes it formal — and stamps who closed the year, and when.

Reopening a year-end close

A closed year can be reopened by an owner or admin, but only the most recent close can be reopened — years unwind in the reverse of the order they closed. Click Reopen on that year and confirm. Reopening:

• Reverses the closing entry with a new journal, taking the year's profit back out of retained earnings.
• Rolls the period lock back to the previous year's end — or unlocks the books entirely if this was the first close.

Nothing is deleted: the close stays in your history marked as reopened, with the reversal beside it. Note that you cannot achieve this by winding the period lock backwards yourself — moving the lock past a standing close is refused, because it would leave the year writable while its closing entry still stood. Reopen does the whole job in one step.

History and the audit trail

Every close is kept: the page shows each one with its journal entry number, who closed the year and when, and — if it was reopened — who reopened it and when. Lock changes are recorded too, so there is always an answer to "who locked this, and when"; see Audit log.

Locks and VAT returns

Filing a VAT return freezes the return's figures but not the books behind them. That is why, right after filing, PulseBooks suggests locking the period through the return's last day — one click brings you here with the date already filled in, and the usual confirmation still stands between you and the lock.