Create an accounting period
Use Menu > Accounting > Accounting periods to create a fiscal year, fiscal quarter, base period, or adjustment period when the periods created during account setup or automatic processing do not meet your needs. Create the fiscal year before its child periods so that the accounting-period hierarchy remains complete.
In most cases, you don’t need to create accounting periods because QuickStart creates them during your initial account setup. For more information, see Get started with accounting periods.
QuickStart also creates accounting periods periodically based on your accounting preferences. For more information about the automatic creation of accounting periods, see Get started with accounting period preferences.
You can create three different types of accounting periods:
- Fiscal year is the highest-level period. You can create its quarters and months at the same time. See Create a fiscal year.
- Fiscal quarter is a child of a fiscal year. See Create a fiscal quarter.
- Fiscal period is a base or adjustment period with specific start and end dates. See Create a fiscal period.
Note:
Use caution when manually setting up individual accounting periods to avoid creating incomplete or incorrect period rollups.
It is best practice to set up a fiscal year first because it’s the highest level period in the accounting period rollup. Then set up the subperiods that belong to that fiscal year. Typically, a fiscal year consists of quarters and months.