Closing the Books

A period you’ve already reported on has to stop moving. Once the VAT return is filed and the figures are with your fiduciary, a booking dated last March that changes in June means your books no longer match what you submitted — and nobody finds out until someone reconciles the two, months later.

neoo gives you two tools for this, and they do genuinely different jobs:

• The period lock — one cut-off date. Everything dated on or before it is frozen. It’s a setting, so it can be moved back.
• Year End — the closing entry that empties your income and expense accounts into equity so the new year starts from zero.

“Audit” and “Audit Log” are two different screens#

Worth settling first, because they sit next to each other in the menu, share the same permission, and are easy to open by mistake.

• General Ledger → Audit is the settings screen this page is about: the period lock and the deletion rule. Two settings and Save.
• General Ledger → Audit Log is the searchable history of who changed what across the whole dataset — filter by type, action, person, or free text. It has its own page.

Both require the audit permission. Separately, individual records — journal entries, sales invoices, AR/AP transactions, customer and vendor records — carry their own History section showing that record’s own changes. The Audit screen has one too, at the bottom, recording the changes made on this screen; lock moves made by Year End or by Lock Period are recorded in the Audit Log against the closing entry or the VAT period instead.

Locking a period#

Close Books up to takes a date and freezes everything on or before it. Save applies it.

The date itself is included. Close books up to 31.12.2025 and 31.12.2025 is locked; the first open day is 01.01.2026.

There is one lock date for the whole dataset, and three places write to it: this screen, Lock Period on the VAT report, and Year End. They are not separate locks — whichever you used last is the one in force.

What a lock does, and how you’ll notice#

This is worth being precise about, because the symptom is quiet enough to waste an afternoon.

Open a journal entry, sales invoice, vendor invoice or AR/AP transaction dated inside the closed period and the Post and Delete buttons are not there. Not disabled with an explanation — absent. You can open the document and read it; you just can’t put it back.

That is the answer to almost every “why can’t I post this?” question, and the reason it’s hard to spot is that nothing is wrong with the transaction. It’s the date. So when a posting won’t go through and the form looks fine, check the transaction date against the lock before you look at anything else.

The same rule catches new work, with one deliberate way out:

• A new transaction dated into the closed period can’t be posted.
• The way out is Post as New — change the date to an open one and the button appears (it’s hidden too while the date sits in the closed period). Posting as new creates a new entry on the open date, and that’s the quickest way to rescue something stuck behind the lock.
• An expense dated into a closed period is refused outright: “That date falls in a closed accounting period.”
• Bulk and AI-driven updates leave closed-period transactions alone rather than failing the whole batch — an AI-driven change tells you how many it skipped and can be asked to include them.

Reopening#

Clear the date, or move it earlier, and Save. The lock holds no history of its own — reopening a period leaves it exactly as it was, and the change is recorded in History on the same screen.

Moving the lock earlier reopens everything between the new date and the old one, including periods you have already filed. That’s the intended escape hatch when a correction genuinely has to be made — but it means anyone with the audit permission can reopen a filed VAT period. Keep that permission narrow.

Enforce Transaction Reversal for all Dates#

The principle behind this one: your books should never lose a transaction. A mistake gets corrected by a second entry that reverses the first, so both stay visible and the trail stays readable — which is what an auditor expects to find.

Tick it and Delete disappears from journal entries, sales invoices, vendor invoices, AR/AP transactions and orders — and Batch delete from Batch Update — for every date, open period or not. Untick it and Delete comes back.

It’s narrower than the name suggests, so it’s worth knowing exactly what you’re getting:

• It removes deletion. Nothing can be made to vanish, at any date.
• It doesn’t freeze anything. A transaction in an open period can still be edited and re-posted. If you need dates to stop moving, that’s the period lock — this setting isn’t a substitute for it.
• It doesn’t write the reversal for you. On journal entries, sales invoices and AR/AP transactions the Reversal button prepares the opposite entry, dated today, for you to review and post — vendor invoices don’t have one — and it’s there whether or not this setting is on.
• It’s a setting, not a state. Nothing already posted is affected by switching it either way.

Turn it on if you want deletion off the table permanently. Use it together with the period lock, not instead of it.

Year End#

Year End posts the one entry you don’t want to build by hand: it empties every income and expense account into equity, so the closed year’s result lands where the balance sheet expects it and the new year starts from zero.

Go to General Ledger → Year End (requires the year end permission).

Process Year End posts it. The year-end date and a retained earnings account are both required.

What gets posted#

A single journal entry, dated on the year-end date:

• every income account is debited by its balance, bringing it to zero
• every expense account is credited by its balance, bringing it to zero
• the difference — your profit or loss — goes to the Retained Earnings Account: credited for a profit, debited for a loss

It’s an ordinary journal entry, so it appears in the GL Journal like anything else. Past closings are listed at the bottom of the Year End screen, each Reference linking to the entry itself.

The figures are calculated from the start of your books up to the year-end date, with earlier closings taken into account — so each year closes its own result rather than the accumulated total, as long as you close your years in order.

Cash or Accrual#

Accrual closes what you’ve booked: every posted invoice counts, paid or not. This is the normal choice and the one the screen starts on each time you open it.

Cash closes what actually moved: a sales or vendor invoice counts only once it’s been paid. Manual journal entries count either way.

Choose the basis your accounts are actually prepared on. If you don’t know, it’s Accrual — and it’s worth one question to your fiduciary rather than a guess, because the wrong basis closes the wrong figures.

Year End sets the lock for you#

Processing a year end moves Close Books up to to the year-end date, so the year you just closed is protected immediately, with no second step.

The lock only ever moves forward. If your lock already stands later than the year you’re closing — say it’s at 30.06.2026 and you go back to close 2025 — it stays where it is. Closing an old year can never reopen a period you’ve already filed.

Correcting a closing#

A year end isn’t a one-shot action. Run it again for the same date and the previous closing for that date is removed and replaced with a freshly calculated one — so a December invoice that arrived late, or the wrong retained earnings account, is fixed by simply processing it again.

Two things to know before you do:

• Processing an earlier year also removes the later closings. Re-run 2024 while 2025 is already closed and the 2025 closing goes with it. Re-run each following year afterwards, in order.
• Removing a closing outright — rather than replacing it — means opening it from the journal and deleting it, which first means moving the lock back past it, since the closing sits on the lock date.

Neither is difficult, but both are easier to do deliberately than to discover afterwards. Check the retained earnings account and the basis before you process, and the rest is routine.

How reports read a closed year#

Once a year is closed its income and expense accounts sit at zero — but the Income Statement for that year still shows the real result. Closing entries are deliberately left out of it, so a closed 2025 reads exactly as it did before you closed it, instead of collapsing to nothing.

The Balance Sheet works the other way for earlier years: their closing entries are included, so each closed year’s result sits in equity where it belongs. A balance sheet dated exactly on a closing date still leaves that day’s closing out. Your dashboard follows the same split.

So a P&L that still shows last year’s profit after you’ve closed the year isn’t a mistake — it’s both reports doing their job.