Finalise your year end
When a financial year's figures are final, you finalise it. Sales Scribe records the year's profit, the earnings brought into it, who signed it off and when — and changes nothing else.
Before you begin
- You need a financial year end recorded. Until then there are no periods to finalise.
- The period must have ended. A year still running cannot be signed off, because its figures are still moving.
- You need permission to manage accounting settings — the same permission that sets the year end itself.
Steps
- Go to Banking → Year End.
- Find the year you want to sign off. Years that have ended but have never been finalised are the ones to look at.
- Select Finalise, add a note if it helps (for example "approved by the board on 12 June"), and confirm.
[Screenshot required: Year End page listing financial periods with their finalisation state]
What finalising does — and does not do
It records: the period's profit or loss, the earnings brought into it, the resulting earnings carried out, the person who signed it off, the date, and a revision number.
It does not post anything. There is no closing journal. Profit is not moved into reserves, no ledger entry is written, and no account is zeroed.
That is deliberate. If Sales Scribe wrote a journal clearing your income and expense accounts at each year end, every report covering a range that crossed a year boundary — a rolling twelve months, a management profit and loss on a different cycle, an account drill-down across March — would have to know to ignore it. Instead, the balance sheet works both figures out from the ledger every time it is drawn. A late entry into last year therefore corrects the report by itself.
It does not lock anything. Finalising says "these are the figures"; a posting lock says "nothing may be dated here". They are separate on purpose: a filed year can be temporarily unlocked so an accountant can adjust it, and a quarter can be locked long before its year end is done.
"Postings are waiting on the lock"
If the Year End page shows that postings are waiting on the lock, an online refund, card dispute or payout arrived from Stripe dated inside a locked period and could not be booked. Review them before signing a year off — a year with a refund waiting outside its ledger is not final. See Lock your books.
"Needs re-finalising"
If something dated inside a finalised year is posted after it was signed off, the year shows as Needs re-finalising. The figures that were signed off are no longer what the ledger says.
Nothing is wrong, and nothing is broken — it is telling you that a correction landed in a year you had finished with. What to do about it is an accounting decision, not a software one: the entry may be right where it is, it may belong in the current period instead, or the prior year's comparatives may need restating. Sales Scribe does not choose for you.
You will see the same warning on the reports themselves: a balance sheet dated inside a finalised year, and a profit and loss covering one, carry a notice saying whether the year's sign-off still holds. When it does not, the notice shows the profit that was signed off next to what the ledger says now, and links you back here.
When you are satisfied, finalise the year again. That adds revision 2 rather than overwriting revision 1: what the accounts said on the day they were first signed off stays on record, and the year-end screen lists every earlier sign-off under Earlier sign-offs — the date, who signed, the profit recorded and the note — so the figures that were filed can always be read back.
A new revision is written only when the year needs re-finalising. A year whose sign-off still matches the ledger shows Signed off · revision 1 with no Finalise button, and if a second sign-off is submitted anyway — a page submitted twice, or two people at once — it is declined with the date of the sign-off that stands. The revision number therefore means "the figures changed", never "somebody clicked again".
Reopening a year
Reopen marks a finalised period as open again, so it reads as work in progress. The finalisation records are kept.
If you reopen a year and then finalise it again without anything having changed, the sign-off already on record stands and the year simply closes again — no new revision, because the figures are the ones already signed off.
Reopening does not unlock anything. If entries are being refused, that is the posting lock, and you change it in Accounting settings.
Where dividends and drawings go
Money the owners take out of the business is posted to its own Equity account — Dividends in a company, Owner's Drawings for a sole trader, Partners' Drawings in a partnership, Members' Drawings in an LLP. It is separate from Retained Earnings, which is the profit left in the business.
If your Chart of Accounts was created before Sales Scribe included that account, the Chart of Accounts page offers to add it for you.
Troubleshooting
- The Finalise button says "Not yet ended". The period is still running. A year can only be signed off once it has finished.
- "This period does not end until …". The same thing, from the server — usually because the page was open while the date changed.
- The year-end page says no financial year is recorded. Set one in Accounting settings first.
- A finalised year keeps going back to "Needs re-finalising". Something is still being posted into it. The audit trail shows what.
- "This period was signed off on … and nothing dated inside it has changed since." The year is already signed off and its figures still match the ledger, so there is nothing to re-finalise — usually a page submitted twice, or a colleague who got there first. The sign-off on record is the one that counts.