Set your financial year end
Your financial year end is the date your accounts are made up to. Telling Sales Scribe what it is turns on financial-year reporting: reports can cover your actual year rather than the calendar one, and the balance sheet can separate this year's profit from earlier years'.
Until you set it, nothing changes. Everything you have already entered stays exactly as it is.
Before you begin
- Sign in and select your organisation. You need the manage accounting settings permission.
- Have two dates to hand: the day and month your year ends, and the date your records begin.
- If you are a limited company or LLP, that second date is the date you were incorporated — see below, because it is not the date you started trading.
Set it
- Go to Settings → Accounting Settings and find the Financial year card.
- Enter the day and month your financial year ends — for many UK businesses, 31 March.
- Enter the date your records begin (labelled Incorporated on for a company or LLP, Records begin otherwise).
- Choose Set.
Sales Scribe works out your financial periods from there and lists them on the card. The one you are in now is named at the top: "You are in Year ending 31 March 2027." Periods keep coming as time passes — there is nothing to set again each year.
What it is called depends on what you are
| Your organisation is a… | The setting is called… |
|---|---|
| Limited company, LLP | Accounting reference date |
| Sole trader, partnership | Accounting date |
The wording follows the law rather than our preference, and so do the rules behind it.
Limited companies and LLPs
Your first financial year begins on the day you were incorporated, not when you started trading. (The date you started trading matters for Corporation Tax, which is a different period — see the note on accounting periods below.)
Your first period must be longer than six months and no more than eighteen. Companies House sets a new company's first accounting reference date to the last day of the month your first anniversary falls in, so the first year usually runs a little over twelve months. A company incorporated on 20 June 2025 gets a date of 30 June, and a first period running from 20 June 2025 to 30 June 2026.
Sole traders and partnerships
You may make your accounts up to any date you choose, and Sales Scribe does not impose the six- and eighteen-month bounds on you.
Your profits are allocated to the tax year regardless of the date you choose, so this setting governs your accounts rather than your tax return. It is deliberately not called a "basis period" — since basis-period reform those are two different things, and conflating them would mislead.
52- and 53-week years
If you make your accounts up to, say, the last Friday in March rather than to 31 March itself, that is allowed: the end of a period may sit within seven days either side of your stated date. Set the date you nominally work to, and the seven-day allowance covers the rest.
Change it
Enter a new day and month on the same card and choose Change.
- Periods that have already ended keep their dates. Reports you have already run do not move.
- The period you are in now is shortened or extended to meet the new date, and everything after it is regenerated.
So changing a 31 March year end to 31 August partway through 2026 leaves your completed years alone, ends the current period on 31 August 2026 — a five-month period, which the card labels "Period ending 31 August 2026" rather than calling it a year — and starts a fresh year from 1 September.
That short period is real and stays in your records. It is what a year-end change actually produces.
Companies and LLPs: Companies House has its own rules about shortening and extending an accounting reference date, including a limit on how often you may extend. Sales Scribe does not enforce those, and changing the date here does not notify Companies House. Tell them separately.
What this does and does not do
It does:
- Give the reports This financial year and Last financial year periods. See Reports overview.
- Let the balance sheet separate earnings brought forward from current earnings, instead of showing all-time profit as "current".
It does not:
- Lock anything by itself. Stopping entries being dated into a finished period is a separate setting on the same card — see Lock your books. The two are deliberately independent: you can lock without recording a year end, and recording a year end locks nothing.
- Sign a year off by itself. That is finalising, on Banking → Year End. Finalising records what the year's figures were; it still writes no closing journal, so the figures stay worked out from your ledger every time a report is drawn, and a late entry into an earlier period corrects the numbers by itself.
A financial period is not a Corporation Tax accounting period
Worth knowing if you are a company, because the two are easy to confuse:
- A financial period is what your accounts cover. It can run up to eighteen months.
- A Corporation Tax accounting period is what a company tax return covers, and it can never exceed twelve months.
So a first period of, say, fourteen months is one set of accounts and two tax returns. Sales Scribe records the first; the second is not something it currently works out.