End of Year Reporting

From NewHaven Software Wiki

There are a few best practices for year-end reporting that are time sensitive and should be followed, at least if you want to keep your accountant happy. Most all of CMS's reports can be run for a selected range of dates so when run them is not so critical. There are some reports, however, that are run only as a snapshot of a moment in time and cannot be run for previous dates or date ranges. We refer to these as "fluid" reports, changing by the moment. Examples of fluid reports include:

• Accounts Receivable - A/R is a sum of all of the balances on shipped invoices. As invoices are posted as shipped or payments applied to shipped invoices your A/R figures change. There are a couple of A/R reports you can choose from but, whatever your choice, you'll want to run it after all processing is done for the year to get a snapshot of your final A/R figure for the year.

• Inventory - Your stock levels and the value of inventory on hand also is ever-changing with every lot and PO received, order placed, backorder fulfilled, return processed, etc. A common figure needed by your accountant for year end is the value of inventory on hand (an asset). Like the A/R report, this is a fluid report and must be run at end of your period/year after all processing is complete to get that snapshot. Typically the report used to obtain value of inventory on hand is the Lot Summary report, run from Reports>Inventory>Lots. This report provides a detail breakdown of each stocked item on hand, the unit cost, total value of the lot and total value of all lots in each warehouse. An abbreviated version of this is also included in the Order Processing Summary report. Another option is the Reports>Inventory>InventoryValuebyWarehouse report.

Most any of CMS reports, including those above, may be saved in assorted formats (PDF, Excel, HTML, others) or its data exported to a file.

Another best practice is to create a backup of your CMS database after all processing for the period/year is completed. Once the backup is finished, rename it and/or move it to another directory. This backup database can be restored in the future to allow end of year reporting to be run at any time.