Closing the books

Closing is how a period stops changing. Lock a month once you have reconciled it, close a year once every month in it is locked, and the numbers you reported stay the numbers you reported.

Opening balances

If you are moving to LawnLedger from something else, your accounts start at zero and your real business does not. The opening-balances worksheet in Books → Accounting → Opening balances is where you tell it otherwise.

Enter what each account was worth on the day your books start here. Active, leaf accounts of a balance-sheet type only - assets, liabilities and equity. Profit-and-loss accounts have no opening balance; their history is what it is.

Applying the worksheet posts one balanced manual entry against 3100 Opening Balance Equity, dated to your books-start day. Re-running it replaces the previous one: every earlier opening entry is reversed at its original date and a fresh one posts. Nothing is edited, because nothing in the ledger ever is.

Locking a month

Books → Accounting → Close walks a month: reconcile the bank, review anything uncategorized, check the trial balance foots, then lock it.

A locked month refuses new entries dated inside it. That is the point - it is what makes last month’s report reproducible. Date the correction in the current month instead, which is usually the right answer anyway.

Closing a year

Books → Accounting → Year-end. LawnLedger will refuse until all of these are true, and will tell you which one is not:

• The ledger is active
• The fiscal year has actually elapsed
• Every period in it is locked
• The trial balance balances
• The prior year is closed
• The year is not already closed

Closing posts a manual entry dated the last day of the fiscal year, zeroing every revenue and expense account into 3900 Retained Earnings. Its lines are flagged as closing entries, which is what keeps a closed year’s profit and loss intact - see accounting basis for which statements include them and which do not.

Reopening

Reopening a closed year is owner-only. It posts an exact same-date reversal of the closing entry - the close is undone in the record, not erased from it.

The closing entry itself cannot be reversed from the journal like an ordinary manual entry - reopening the year is the supported path.

The year-end package

Once a year is closed, Year end builds an accountant package: the statements and CSVs your accountant asks for, kept so you can re-download a past build rather than rebuilding it. Building and downloading need reports.export; the shareable link is owner-only.

Related

• Accounting basis
• The general ledger
• Reconciliation