Every accountant knows the feeling. It’s the first week of the new fiscal year, and the books need to be closed. In some offices, that means a checklist taped to the monitor, a “stay out of the system” email to the whole company, and a very long afternoon.
Whether that describes your office depends a lot on your ERP. Welcome to Round 7 of our Functionality Face-Off series — the last stop in our General Ledger tour. We’ve covered how transactions get in (journal entries) and how results get out (financial reporting). Today: how the year gets closed.
How It Works in Dynamics GP: The Year-End Routine
GP’s year-end close is a formal event. Microsoft’s official year-end closing procedures for General Ledger list fourteen steps. The short version:
- Close every other module first, in order — post final transactions and run the year-end routines for Inventory, Receivables, Payables, and Fixed Assets before touching General Ledger. Order matters.
- Post final adjusting entries in General Ledger.
- Print an account list and verify every account’s posting type — Balance Sheet accounts carry forward; Profit and Loss accounts close to retained earnings. A wrong posting type here means wrong numbers next year.
- Verify General Ledger Setup — the retained earnings account, and that history is set to be maintained.
- Make a backup. Not a suggestion — if the routine is interrupted partway, a restore may be the way back.
- Print the final Detailed Trial Balance and year-end financial statements.
- Set up the new fiscal year, then run the Year-End Closing routine (Tools > Routines > Financial > Year-End Closing). GP moves the year to history, zeroes P&L accounts into retained earnings, and rolls Balance Sheet balances forward.
- Make another backup.
It’s dependable when done carefully, and thousands of companies run it every January. But it’s an event: users out of the system while the routine runs, a hard sequence across modules, and pressure to get adjustments in before you close. GP can post to the most recent historical year if you enable it, but reaching further back is a genuine project.
How It Works in Business Central: Two Steps, No Drama
BC treats year-end as bookkeeping, not surgery (Microsoft Learn):
- Close the year. Search (Alt+Q) for Accounting Periods, use Create Year to set up the new year if you haven’t, then choose Close Year. The old year’s periods are marked Closed and Date Locked. Done in seconds.
- Close the income statement. Run the Close Income Statement batch job. It builds a journal that zeroes every income statement account into retained earnings as of year-end. Review the journal, post it, done.
There is no module-close sequence — subledgers don’t have year-end routines to run in order. Nobody has to log out. And here’s the part GP users don’t expect: you can still post to a closed year. Late audit adjustment in March? Post it — BC marks it as a prior-year entry, then just run Close Income Statement again to sweep the change into retained earnings. No reopening, no restore, no drama.
Day to day, BC handles “soft closes” with Allow Posting From/To dates in General Ledger Setup and per-user settings — lock last month for everyone except the controller in two fields. As a SaaS product, backups are continuous and automatic, so “make a backup” isn’t even on the checklist (Encore Business Solutions).
Side-by-Side Comparison
| Feature | Dynamics GP | Business Central |
|---|
| Feature | Dynamics GP | Business Central |
|---|---|---|
| Year-end steps | 14-step checklist | 2 steps (Close Year + Close Income Statement) |
| Module close order | Required — Inventory, AR, AP, FA before GL | None — no subledger year-end routines |
| Users during close | Everyone out while routine runs | Keep working |
| Backups | Manual, before and after | Automatic (SaaS) |
| Posting to a closed year | Most recent history year only, if enabled | Any closed year — marked prior-year entry |
| Fixing late adjustments | Time pressure before close | Post, then re-run Close Income Statement |
| Month-end lock | Close fiscal periods per series | Allow Posting From/To dates, per user |
Why BC Comes Out Ahead
- Two steps instead of fourteen. Close the year, close the income statement. Most BC customers finish the mechanics in minutes, not an afternoon.
- The close isn’t a cliff. Auditors always find something in February. In BC a prior-year adjustment is a normal posting plus a re-run of one batch job — not a reopening ceremony.
- No system lockdown. Sales keeps invoicing while accounting closes the books. Nobody schedules the close around the business.
- Less risk. No mid-routine crashes, no backup-and-pray, no module sequence to get wrong. The scary parts of GP year-end simply don’t exist in BC.
Make Next Year-End the Easy Kind
If your January checklist looks like a flight manual, it might be time to see the alternative. The Aisling Dynamics team has guided companies through their last GP year-end and their first BC one — and the before-and-after stories are our favorite kind.
Contact us or call (251) 293-0555 to talk about what year-end could look like — and come back tomorrow as the Face-Off moves into Purchasing with Round 8: purchase orders.