Company Preferences & Closing the Financial Year

Review company preferences and walk through the year-end close checklist.

0:24 · narrated, with on-screen captions

Steps

  1. Open Maintain → Company Preferences
  2. Review options like "Allow Negative Stock"
  3. Save your preferences
  4. Open the Close Cockpit
  5. Review the financial year checklist
  6. Close the financial year when everything is confirmed

This tutorial covers two screens that don't fit neatly into a single workflow the way procurement or sales do, but both matter: the switches that change how the rest of the app behaves, and the checklist that closes out a financial year for good.

Allow Negative Stock, explained

This is the single preference every earlier tutorial in the sales cycle referenced without fully explaining: off by default, it blocks a sale or delivery that would take an item's quantity on hand below zero. Turning it on lets those transactions go through anyway, with the shortfall shown as a warning rather than a hard stop — useful for businesses that sell against stock still in transit, less useful if you rely on the block to catch genuine inventory mistakes.

What closing a financial year actually checks

The Close Cockpit is a checklist, not a single button: trial balance balanced, no draft or unvalidated transactions sitting around, and cash/bank accounts reconciled. Every item has to be true before closing makes sense, because closing is meant to be final — it locks the period so past numbers can't shift under a report you've already filed or handed to an auditor.

On Business-tier plans, the same screen also offers a signed audit-bundle checkpoint — a cryptographically sealed snapshot of the ledger up to that point, meant for exactly the moment an auditor asks whether anything's been altered since.

Tips

  • Run the Trial Balance report (covered in the financial reports tutorial) before opening Close Cockpit — it's faster to fix an imbalance there than to discover it mid-checklist.
  • Company Preferences changes take effect immediately and app-wide — there's no per-document override once a setting like negative stock is toggled.
  • Closing a year isn't reversible from the UI in the way editing a draft is — treat the checklist as a genuine final review, not a formality to click through.
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