Overview: Year-End Close
On this page:
- Year-End Close Calendars
- Year-End Close Defined
- Specific Year-End Close Processes
- Schedules and Deadlines
>> Managing Year-End Close Activities Presentation
Year-End Close Calendars
Year-End Close Defined
Year-End Close is performed to finalize a snap shot of transactional activity for an entire fiscal year. Stanford's financial fiscal year is September through August. Most processes run at Year-End Close are also run on a daily, weekly and/or monthly basis. For Year-End, these processes are performed for the last time for the entire fiscal year to ensure all transactions are posted and reflected on reports. The year is officially closed when these processes are complete (including posting).
Specific Year-End Close Processes
There are a couple of processes that are integral to Year-End Close: Clearing of Organization Suspense Accounts and PTA Maintenance Blackout.
Clearing of Organization Suspense Accounts
Organization Suspense Accounts (OSA) are accounts configured for every department to hold payroll transactions that either post in errors or are missing a Labor Schedule. All OSA transactions are to be cleared on a quarterly basis per policy; any remaining transactions at quarter end 'sweep' deadlines are moved to that department's funded guarantee account and incur a $25 fee per OSA transaction line.
During Year-End Close, Financial Management Services (FMS) performs an OSA sweep for transactions posted to OSA's that have not been cleared. A $25 per payroll transaction fee is charged for swept transactions. Additional sweeps for August payroll periods are also done during Year-End Close, but fees are waived. For more information, see Overview: Organization Suspense Accounts for Labor.
PTA Maintenance Blackout
PTA Maintenance Blackout is a system control that prevents updates to PTAs during year-end close activities. This control ensures minimal interruption to back-end processes that may fail due to PTA updates. PTA segments should not be updated during this time. See Annual Freeze on Requests for New or Change to an Existing Expenditure Type / Object Code.
Schedules and Deadlines
At year-end, there are two preliminary closes before the final close. This allows end users to view August Month-End Close data and make additional corrections and adjustments before the final close. Once Final Year-End Close has occurred, no more corrections or adjustments may be applied to the prior year (year being closed).
The year being closed remains open for three additional weeks in the new fiscal year in order to process all prior fiscal year transactions.
- All transactions will occur in the last month of the fiscal year, August.
- Prior months will not be re-opened, so all adjustments will be reflected in August.
- During this time, transactions for the new fiscal year may be entered into the Oracle system but will not be posted into the new fiscal year until the prior year is finally closed.
The Year-End Close officially begins Monday, August 29, 2017. There are five distinct closing stages for Year-End Close activities:
For more information on how to perform Year-End Close tasks, review How To... and Resources sections.