I have seen in another thread but I'm unsure on how the 'transaction locking' works with regards to new and old transactions.
When producing monthly accounts if I close December 24 accounts on 8th Jan 25 will transaction locking prevent me from posting new documents into December.
I feel the system needs a document date and then a posting date.
If a supplier invoice is received dated 10th Dec 24 but due to an admin error is not received until 15th Jan 25. I would need to post it with a document date as 10th Dec 24 but the posting date of the document would be 15th Jan 25 and this would result in the document being posted into the January accounting period.
As it sounds like you already know, the "Bill Date" is the posting date. What you're calling "document date" is a concept that doesn't really exist in Books, at least not to my knowledge.
Other than just recording the official date of the vendor's document, how would this "document date" be used? Would you ever pull reports or anything trying to use that date?
The simple answer is to just add a custom field for this and only enter a document date if it's different than the Bill Date (what you call "posting date"). If you want that field always filled, a simple automation could fill it with the Bill Date if empty when saving.
It's possible to bend the software to your process, but another option might be to consider tweaking your process. Is it necessary to close and lock the previous month so soon? We typically wait a full month before closing the previous month, to allow for exactly the situation you've explained. One benefit of this is more accurate accrual reporting; the bill in the scenario you described could be accurately recorded as a December bill and be reflected in our accounting reports.
I'm not saying this is the right answer for you, just another possible tack to consider.
With regards to the bill date and the document date I think it would be a case of being able to accurately report and record the entries. If we received an invoice in February for December and we had already closed December we would have to post the invoice with a bill date of February.
If there was then an issue with the supplier and our account with them and I tried to reconcile the ledger it would be made more difficult because the dates I have recorded in our ledger wouldn't match their dates.
This then leads onto the second point you made about leaving the ledgers open for longer. Yes, this is possible however, by the time I am then producing financial reports is my information then already outdated? And unfortunately, with the industry we operate in our suppliers are not always efficient enough to send us their invoices regularly or within a timely manner.
Is it correct that by locking the transactions I can still post into the 'locked periods'? Does it only prevent the amendment of the current transactions or does it stop new postings?
On your query on locking of transactions, typically it is enabled to lock all transactions , whether new or amendment to a closed (i.e locked) period. Of course the admin user can unlock it to allow transaction into the locked period, it is not a hard lock process anyway - it is kept for maintaining financial data integrity. If you have a genuine case in hand and if it does not impact your compliances in any manner for updating in Dec and if your administrator approves the unlock, you can just update the same in Dec period itself. With regards to posting date, the workaround is that you can check the audit trail report that will tell you that the posting happened in Jan when you actually posted it. Audit trail can be seen under reports-activity-audit trail.
Once transactions are locked for that period, no further posting or editing in that period can occur, unless you unlock it (which I think you can do, not totally sure).
I think you'll want to put a Custom Field in place for this document date. You'll just need to know that the system Bill Date field is what you think of as "posting date" and proceed accordingly.
For the last few weeks I have been using the transaction locking functionality. I have currently locked our transactions from 30th April 2024 (screenshot attached).
However, my colleague today has processed a bill with a bill date of 18th April 2024. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like the transaction locking does prevent users from posting new transactions into the 'locked' period.