Manage the entire process of closing an accounting period

1. Set up your accounting periods: Create accounting periods in Zuora to match your financial periods. This allows Zuora to align all transactions to your accounting periods, and shows you how your business performed across multiple accounting periods.
2. Map your accounting codes: Accounting codes are used as offsetting general ledger (GL) account to your accounts receivable (AR) account. Make sure you associate accounting codes with charges in the product catalog, with payment methods and credit balance adjustments. This ensures that Zuora summarizes all transactions according to groupings that make sense for your business. For example, for an annual subscription charge, you might use the accounting code "2000 - Deferred Subscription Revenue" that represents a deferred revenue account in your GL. This means when an invoice is posted, you are debiting AR and crediting "2000 - Deferred Subscription Revenue."
3. Set the accounting period to Pending Close. This will automatically trigger a trial balance run, which shows you the latest AR summary data, and also shows any unresolved transactions.
4. Fix the required and optional actions for your trial balance: If there are any unresolved transactions in your accounting period, you can (or must) fix them before you close the accounting period.
5. After reconciling transactions, if required, you are ready to close your accounting period. On the accounting period detail page, click more > Close this Accounting Period.

   Upon setting the accounting period to Close, a trial balance run will be automatically triggered. After this trial balance run, you can export detailed information about the accounting period and use that to create summary journal entries in your accounting system.

   If necessary, you can re-open a closed accounting period. There are strict rules about reopening accounting periods, so we recommend that you read about how this works in Zuora.