[Accounting Period Close] hi everyone, newly joined this channel and wanted to share my first discussion. Looking to hear thoughts on some practical, real-world best practices/watchouts/experiences on period close... I know there's a lot in suiteanswers and the web but they are mostly about going over the period close checklist steps in the system. We're a retail company that hasn't done period close yet in the system for a year now (since we needed to stabilise Netsuite first particularly integrations), oneworld with multiple subsidiaries, and with a lot of integrations as well for our sales and inventory transfers processes. What would be your 'gotcha' moments? One of our worries is that while we perform closing, there might be effects in the next open periods, could be the system generated ones like currency revaluations or inventory cost revaluations. Intercompany eliminations could be a tricky area as well. Thank you.

From my experience, it is important to close the period for sure to prevent anything from posting to that period and having numbers change. The thing that sticks out the most to me with the importance of this involves taxes. If say you pay in monthly or quarterly income taxes, or sales taxes monthly based off of figures you pulled from a certain period, if anything ends up getting posted later to that period after you filed your taxes, it could change the amount that should have been reported, if you don't file a tax amendment. This could cause issues down the road such as if you were audited. I worked for a company once that never closed their periods, and we had a lot of questions from our accountant that was hired at year end when he was dealing with our taxes, seeing that figures reported from some periods didn't at the time match the books.

Thank you Chloe, agree on this and what we plan to do as well is take a snapshot of the balances and business activity statement / tax reports to make sure we keep track of anything that suddenly changes as we close the books.

@Nico - one of the NS closing period steps is currency reval, another - elimination of intercompany transactions. I cannot personally overvalue the importance of performing these steps. I would suggest confirming you have proper intercompany setting (with intercompany customers and vendors) and you have default intercompany accounts set (not just between two subs but one intercompany AP and one intercompany AR for all). It that is the case I would certainly close periods without hesitation. Otherwise you will keep drugging out your reval/intercompany issues without solving them.

Thanks Karina. Yep I think we are good in terms of the interco setups, with the only exception being the intercompany COGS account which should not be marked for elimination (SuiteAnswers ID 80908). We have mistakenly marked this for elimination when we started using Netsuite (as common sense says interco accounts by default should be marked for elimination). We haven't run intercompany eliminations yet though, so I think we can simply unmark it before doing so. For reference we have 2 cogs accounts - one for the external (actual) Cogs not marked for elimination and one intercompany (mistakenly marked for elimination).

@Nico - correct, COGs should not be marked for elimination. you should be fine wit the IC elimination process - assuming you created intercompany customers and vendors and you have intercompany AR and AP set as defaults under Accounting Preferences - Items/Transactions