Background

The Start a New Fiscal Year process in AccountEdge is a process that most people go through every year. It allows you to keep accurate reporting of your account balances and also makes your file smaller and faster as older data is purged during the process.

Backing Up

It is strongly recommended that before going through the Start a New Fiscal Year process you backup your AccountEdge Company File.

There are two reasons for this. The first reason you want to make a backup is that you want to have a record of previous fiscal year's information. That way, if you are ever audited or need to get reporting on a previous fiscal year you can restore that backup.

What if the Start a New Fiscal Year Process Fails?

The other reason to backup is that if the process fails, the file becomes entirely unusable and a backup must be restored. There is no other way to recover the data other than restoring a backup.

The process can fail for several reasons:

• The computer goes to sleep
• The process takes a long time and the user forces the process to quit
• You are attempting to perform the process across the network and there is a network interruption
• The data file is extremely large (nearing 2 GB)

If the process does fail you will need to restore your backup.

General Start a New Fiscal Year Guidelines

The most important, as noted above, is to backup before Starting the New Fiscal Year. We only reiterate this so much because it really can save a ton of frustration.

Aside from backing up, you want to make sure that your computer is set to not go to sleep. You never want to force the process to quit. Even if the message atop the screen reads "AccountEdge Not Responding" this is often just an indicator that the computer is trying to manage an extremely intensive process. It does not mean force quitting is necessary.

Never attempt to complete the process across the network. You either want to go to the computer that is hosting the file, or copy the file directly to your machine, go through the process and then put it back.

Along the same lines of "AccountEdge Not Responding", the larger the data file, the longer it is going to take to process. With a very large file this could take several hours. If the file size is approaching 2 GB (the maximum for the program) the process may not be able to complete. You can first go through the different purge options and then can attempt the Start a New Fiscal Year process again.