Fiscal Year-end Closing Procedures
It is important to ensure that all financial activity for the year is accurately recorded in your accounts prior to closing the accounts. Refer to the following sections for specific year-end requirements. In particular, please refer to AMS System Availability during the week prior to system close.
Year-end Processing
- Income and Expense Recoveries
- Expenses
- Accruals
- Deferrals
- Prebillings
- Existing Purchase Orders and Commitments
Data Management Activities
- Goods Received and Processed against a Purchase Order
- Outstanding Rejects
- Parked Documents
- New Fund Centres
- AMS System Availability
Year-end Reporting Deadlines and Training
Summary of Year-end Deadlines and Contact Information
Year-end Processing
Income and Expense Recoveries
Where a department or division has rendered a service or delivered a product in the year, the income or expense recovery should be recorded by:
- preparing and sending invoices to your external customers. Invoices should be submitted for processing by the Accounts Receivable Invoice deadline at
- depositing all cash received for cash sales and recoveries directly to the bank or to the Cashier’s Office by the Cashier/Bank Deposit deadline.
- preparing and processing journal entries to record your internal income and expense recoveries by the journal entry deadline .
Expenses
Where a division/department has received goods or services prior to April 30, the expense should be recorded by:
- processing suppliers’ invoices by the Supplier’s Invoices deadline
- processing expense reimbursements by the Supplier’s Invoices deadline . In the case of goods or services purchased from another University department, it is the responsibility of the selling department to ensure that the journal entries are processed by the Journal Entries deadline .
Accruals
An accrual is a means of recording an expense before actually processing the supplier’s invoice and is intended to ensure that all significant expenses for the year are recorded. Accruals are not intended to achieve precise accuracy.
Where a department has incurred an expense (i.e. service or goods, with no PO recorded in FIS) but has not yet received an invoice, an accrued expense must be recorded in your accounts. In order to have the accruals recorded in your accounts, please submit a signed journal entry to Judy Wu, Financial Services Department no later than the year-end accrual/deferral deadline . The journal entry would include the accounts to be charged, including a brief description of the expenses being accrued, leaving the credit side of the journal entry blank. The back-up documentation does not have to be submitted with the journal entry; however, it must be supplied upon request.
Deferrals
A deferral is a means of delaying the recording of an expense or revenue to a future year. A deferral would need to occur when an expense has already been recorded in FIS in the current fiscal year but all or part of that expenditure should be recorded as an expense in the next fiscal year, or when revenue has been recorded in FIS but has not yet been earned.
When a department has recorded an expense in FIS but has not yet received part or all the service by April 30, a deferral of expenses must be recorded in your accounts. An example would be a lease payment that extends into the new fiscal year.
Where a department has recorded revenue but has not yet performed the service or delivered the goods, a deferral of the revenue must be recorded in your accounts.
In each of these cases, a journal entry is required to be processed within FIS. In order to have the deferral recorded in your accounts, please submit a signed journal entry to Judy Wu, Financial Services Department no later than the year-end accrual/deferral deadline . The journal entry would include the accounts to be charged, including a brief description of the expense/revenue being deferred, leaving the respective debit side/credit side of the journal entry blank. The back-up documentation does not have to be submitted with the journal entry; however, it must be supplied upon request. This journal entry is intended to properly reflect all significant revenue and expenses within FIS.
Prebillings
As a general rule, invoices for services which you will provide in the next fiscal year should not be processed in the current fiscal year. However, where it is necessary to prebill, it is important to highlight this on the accounting copy of the invoice which is sent to the Financial Services Department. These invoices will be recorded in a deferred income account and transferred to your income or expense recovery accounts at the beginning of the new fiscal year.
Note:
Internal revenue/expense recovery entries for services to be provided in the next fiscal year should NOT be processed in the current fiscal year.
Existing Purchase Orders and Commitments
To ensure the year-end statement of accounts reflect the correct Purchase Order reserve, POs greater than $50,000 should be submitted to Procurement Services for any adjustments by the recommended timelines provided by Procurement Services .
All Purchase Orders and reserve commitments are carried forward into the next fiscal year irrespective of whether they reside in a Fund Center or Fund account.
For Fund accounts (namely Research) with end dates earlier than May 1st of the next fiscal year, it is important that all Purchase Orders and reserve commitments be finalized prior to the fund end date. The SAP system will not permit these items to be carried forward and, therefore, they will not be available for further processing after May 1st of the next fiscal year. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact your Research Accountant.
You can cancel a Purchase Order regardless of dollar value by following the Finalize and Cancel PO reference guide.
Data Management Activities
Goods Received and Processed against a Purchase Order
In order to ensure that the University reports the correct accrued liability for goods received with no invoice processed to date and reports the correct funds reservation in departmental accounts, we are requesting departments to review the status of all outstanding Purchase Orders, particularly those that have a goods receipt document processed for which an invoice receipt is still outstanding. On March 22, 2024 we will be reversing all goods receipt documents posted prior to December 31st of the current fiscal year, which meet the following criteria:
- no corresponding invoice receipt document was processed
- an invoice receipt document was processed but differences exist between the goods receipt and the invoice document.
Should you require any goods receipt document to remain active in FIS, please provide a list of goods receipt document numbers meeting the two conditions noted above to Linda Wong () no later than the GR/IR clean up deadline to ensure that they are NOT reversed.
Outstanding Rejects
A number of transactions are posted in AMS through automated processes, such as recurring entries, Student Financial System Awards (FICA) and Division/Dept specific batch uploads. These entries can be rejected due to insufficient funds, while external parties continue to receive payments or credits. An example would be rejects for student award payments processed through ROSI/FICA. Students receive credits in their accounts, while the corresponding charges to divisions are rejected. To ensure that the expense (already paid) is appropriately recorded in the fiscal year and that divisional carryforwards reflect their true ending position, divisions should ensure that all such rejects are cleared. This can usually be done by either transferring funds to the NSF CF Center or finding an alternative source of funding and following the appropriate transaction posting process.
For example:
- Recurring Entries – manually post the entry and correct the recurring entry for future postings
- Student Financial System Awards – Run ZSU012 Award Rejects Transaction
- Division/Dept Batch Uploads – Run the ZFIR050 Batch reject listing report and clear through Batch Processing screen (see the Quick Reference Guide for ZFIR050)
.
Parked Documents
Please review all of your parked FIS documents and ensure that you POST all FIS documents that pertain to the current fiscal year. Any parked documents having a posting date earlier than January 31st of the current fiscal year will be deleted from the system during the April month-end processing. See the documentation on posting or deleting a parked document for more information
New Fund Centers
In order to provide sufficient time to correctly classify and report all account activity, the set up and activation of new Fund Centres for the current reporting year will be suspended effective the deadline for new master record requests for fund centres . All requests received after that date will be activated for the next fiscal year.
AMS System Availability
In order to accommodate fiscal year-end closing, the following summarizes the AMS system availability during the week prior to year-end closing:
- Monday, April 15, 2024 – system open until 1:00 am (next day)
- Tuesday, April 16, 2024 – system closed at 5:00 pm (for bi-weekly payroll)
- Wednesday, April 17, 2024 – system open until 1:00 am (next day)
- Thursday, April 18, 2024 – system open until 1:00 am (next day)
- Friday, April 19, 2024 – “Copy Plan to Budget” will occur at 7:00 pm. System will be available April 20, 2024 at 7:00 am)
- Saturday, April 20 and Sunday, April 21, 2024 – system open at 7:00 am until 1:00 am (next day)
- Monday, April 22, 2024 – system closed at 5:00 pm (for monthly payroll phase 1)
- Tuesday, April 23, 2024 – system closed at 5:00 pm (for monthly payroll phase 2)
- Wednesday, April 24, 2024 – system open until 1:00 am (next day)
- Thursday, April 25, 2024 – system is open until 1:00 am (next day). F&S Invoice Workflow closes at 5:00 pm
This year, AMS will close for year-end processing on Friday, April 26, 2024 at 7:00 pm and will re-open on Wednesday, May 1, 2024 at 7:00 am (except the Capital Projects Portal and uSOURCE, both of which will open on Monday, May 1, 2024 at 9:00 am)
For information on the impact of the year-end closing dates on reporting and processing, please refer to the year-end system availability between system close and May 1 .
Year-end Reporting Deadlines and Training
Divisional Operating Reserve Report
Every year, each division must provide a report outlining their plan on how the operating reserve (formerly carryforward) funds will be spent, or in the event of a deficit, a plan for its elimination. Again this year, the Financial Services Department will report to governance the divisional operating reserve balance and disclose how each division will use these reserve funds. Please refer to the Divisional Operating Reserves section for more detailed information on how to prepare your report. As a result of our tight financial deadlines to governance, we request that you submit your operating reserve report by the deadline for divisional operating reserves report.
Year-end Training
The Financial Advisory Services & Training (F.A.S.T) team will be holding a year-end related workshop.
The following workshop is offered once in 2024:
- Year-end Operating Reserves Workshop: This course will introduce you to the best practices and processes involved in year-end operating reserve reporting.
This workshop will be held twice this year: on Tuesday, April 9, 2024 (10:00am – 12:00pm) and on Thursday, April 11, 2024 (2:00 pm to 4:00 pm)
General Contacts
Specific questions may be referred to the following individuals:
Last updated March 12, 2024