Importing a Previous Fiscal Year

You can bring in your previous fiscal year line by line, not just this one. Pick Previous FY start as your cutover date and last year's transactions arrive individually instead of being folded into a single opening balance.

This matters most for budgeting. A budget built against real prior-year figures is a very different thing from one built against a single lump sum.

How far back you can go

One previous fiscal year. That is the limit.

Anything older than the start of your previous fiscal year still becomes part of the opening balance entry, exactly as before. If you try to pick a date earlier than that, the screen refuses it and tells you the earliest date you are allowed to choose.

URBI closes the year for you

When your import includes a full previous fiscal year, URBI closes that year off as part of the commit. You do not have to run a year-end close yourself.

Closing a year does two things:

1. It moves last year's profit or loss into retained earnings, so this year starts from the right place.
2. It marks last year's periods as closed, so nobody can post into a year you have already finished with.

The Review screen tells you this is going to happen before you commit, so it is never a surprise.

What the Review screen tells you:

Reserve money stays in the reserve fund

If your previous year had reserve fund activity, that money closes into the reserve side of your equity, not into operating. Your reserve balance keeps its correct sign and its correct size.

Your reports show the year's real numbers

A closed year still reports what actually happened in it. Your income statement, expense reports and budget figures for last year show the real revenue and the real costs, not zeros.

This is worth stating plainly because it is the opposite of what a closing entry does on its own. Closing a year zeroes out its revenue and expense accounts by design, so a report that simply added up everything in the ledger would show a fully imported year as though nothing happened in it. URBI leaves the closing entry out of those figures, so you see the year you actually had.

Using last year as a budget baseline

Once a previous year is imported and closed, it becomes available as a budget baseline. When you create a budget, the Previous year actuals option is enabled instead of showing "No posted activity".

Undoing it

Reversing the import also undoes the year-end close. The closing entry is voided and every period the import closed is re-opened, so the year goes back to exactly how it was. You can then correct your file and import again.

See How to Reverse an Import.

If a period will not close

Occasionally a period cannot be closed during the import, usually because something else is holding it open. When that happens URBI tells you which periods were left open rather than quietly carrying on, and your import still commits. You can close those periods yourself afterwards from Accounting Settings.

See What's blocking my period close.