Four date measurements are defined in the Financial application in addition to the calendar feature built into the application that is most visible with the calendar picks available for date fields. Definition of these date measures has to occur before most other activity can take place in the application, starting with Fiscal Years, Accounting Periods, and ending with Calendar Dates. The fourth measure is one that is standard and requires no definition - Fiscal Quarters.
Four variants of the term year are used in reference to accounting entries: Calendar Year, Fiscal Year (FY), Accounting Fiscal Year (AFY), and Budget Fiscal Year (BFY). Of the four, only the fiscal year and accounting fiscal year are the same measurement. If a government operates financially on a calendar year, then the first three become the same measurement. However, that is often not the case, thus a difference arises between calendar and fiscal year. A calendar year is the familiar year of January 1 to December 31. The fiscal year is then defined as July 1 to June 30 or October 1 to September 30, depending on the government.
The budget fiscal year is often seen as having the same definition of the fiscal year, however, activity against that budget fiscal year can occur before the start of the fiscal year begin date and after the fiscal year end date. For that matter, accounting activity can occur against a fiscal year before and after the official start and end dates of that year. This pre and post activity is a choice that is tightly controlled within a financial application by one or more of the means described here in this users guide.
Four variants of the term accounting period are used in reference to accounting entries: Accounting Period (APD), Period (PER), Fiscal Period, and Month. Periods 1 thru 12 are the easiest ones to understand because they equate to the 12 months found in a year. CGI Advantage Financial allows for the definition of up to 99 periods to provide reporting and control flexibility. The most common application of accounting periods will extend into periods 13 and possibly 14, called adjustment periods, to contain different accounting entries processed in a subsequent year against a prior year. With 99 periods, an application can have all of the adjustment periods necessary. In fact, an application can even be defined to have bi-weekly or weekly periods, given 99 are available.
This section contains the following sections: