Set up accounting periods
Create accounting periods in Zuora to match your company's financial calendar
Overview
A key step in configuring Finance is to create accounting periods in Zuora to match your company's financial calendar. This allows Zuora to produce reports and data exports organized by accounting periods, and to perform the work of closing the accounting periods for the revenue sub-ledger.
Accounting periods usage in Zuora
As you work in Zuora, accounting periods provide the timeframe for most accounting reports. At the end of an accounting period, use Finance to run a trial balance, make any adjustments, and close the accounting period. Once that's done, you can run reports or generate data exports to provide summary or detailed entries for your external accounting system.
The most common accounting periods are monthly accounting periods. However, some companies use quarterly, annual, or a 4/4/5 schedule (4 weeks, 4 weeks, and 5 weeks). In Zuora, we allow you to define any length of accounting period as long as it's at least one day long. But we recommend that you use the same periods that you use in your accounting system.
In traditional accounting systems, you must set up accounting periods far in advance,and if you have a transaction that occurs during an accounting period which has not yet been created, then everything halts and the process fails. To prevent this, Zuora uses the concept of an open-ended accounting period, which we use to capture all transactions that fall in the future outside of any existing accounting period.
These topics provide more information on accounting periods:
Enabling Multi-Org
Enabling the Multi-Org feature in your tenant brings the following changes.
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Upon enabling Multi-Org, the system auto-creates accounting periods for each organization (Org).
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The naming convention used for these periods is
<unlabelled-ap-name> - <org name>. This helps in distinguishing the periods for each Org.
Sample use case
When you enable Multi-Org,
Consider the following accounting periods:
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Open-ended
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January 2024
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February 2024
Enable Multi-Org in your tenant, and the following Orgs will be created.
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Global
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EU
The following accounting periods are automatically created:
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Open-Ended - Global
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January 2024 - Global
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February 2024 - Global
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Open-Ended - EU
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January 2024 - EU
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February 2024 - EU
For new unlabelled periods,
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After the initial setup, when you create new unlabelled accounting periods, they are not automatically copied to the Orgs.
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You should manually create accounting periods for each of the Orgs and align the Org accounting period with the corresponding unlabelled org (or global org).
Why cannot I edit the dates of a closed accounting period?
You can edit only the Name, Fiscal Year, Fiscal Quarter, and Notes of any closed accounting periods. If you want to edit the To date, then you must reopen the accounting period .
Why cannot I edit the From date of an accounting period?
You can only edit the From date of the first accounting period in your system. After the first accounting period, all subsequent periods set their From dates to the day following the To date of the previous accounting period. For example, if you create an accounting period From January 1, 2012 and To January 31, 2012, then the next accounting period will automatically start From February 1, 2012.
When should the first accounting period begin?
The first accounting period you create will have to be earlier than your earliest transaction in the system. Zuora will show you the first transaction for your company in Zuora.
For example, if the earliest transaction is dated Feb 8th, 2009, then the first accounting period will need to have a starting date of Feb 8th, 2009 or earlier.