Year End Playbook Templates

The Default Year End Playbook Template includes task templates, notes, and guidelines to help you create your year end playbooks and tasks. Note that the templates might not cover all of your year end requirements, but you can customize them to add additional procedures.

You can use this template to plan your year end activities. It contains the following task templates:

Year End Tasks Templates

Task	Description	Further Information
Suspense and Retained Earnings GLAs	Use this playbook task template to ensure that the Suspense and Retained Earnings GLAs are specified for the selected year before running the Year End process.	Before you start a year end process you must specify the items below on the current company and year. If these items are defined at company level, they are used as a default at year level but you can amend them at any time before the process starts. The general ledger account The general ledger will normally include general ledger accounts (GLAs) for items such as income, expenses, assets, liabilities, and reserves. to use as a suspense account. The general ledger account to use as a retained earnings account. Corporate or local GLAs must be assigned depending on whether the company selected is corporate or local. (Local means that it has a local chart of accounts structure selected.) For more information, see About the Year End Process
Document Status	Use this playbook task template to check the status of documents for the selected year before running the Year End process.	Before running a year end process, you must: Post all transactions Make corrections and adjustments Reconcile bank accounts Check key reports, such as: Debtors aged analysis Creditors aged analysis Trial balance Profit and loss Also known as an income statement. Balance sheet Also known as a statement of financial position.
Special Period Status	Use this playbook task template to check the special periods for the selected year before running the Year End process.	You must make sure that the opening balances in period 000 are the correct brought forward balance sheet values. You must also check that the year being closed has special periods defined, period 000 of the following year exists, and that period 101 of the year being closed and period 000 of the following year do not have documents other than year end transactions posted to them.
Previous Year Adjustments	Use this playbook task template to check the adjustment status of the closed years prior to the selected year before running the Year End process.	Check the adjustment status of any previously closed years to ensure that the company is not in Error status. If it is, log a case with CertiniaCustomer Support to rectify this prior to running any further year end processes for the specific company. Note that if the Adjustment Status field is not displayed on your Year page layouts, you must manually add it.
Previous Year Status	Use this playbook task template to check the status of any open years prior to the selected year before running the Year End process.	You can check year statuses on the Year tab. If you run the year end process for a company that has a previous year open, the previous year status is changed to "Closed" without running the process for that previous year. You must run the year end process chronologically. For more information, see About the Year End Process.
Check Custom Validations	If you have activated custom validations or flows on the Journal, Journal Line Item, Transaction, and Transaction Line Item objects, you can encounter errors when creating year end journals. They can also lead to CPU timeout issues if not deactivated.	Before running your year end process, work with your administrator to review your validation rules on Certinia objects, in particular rules that affect transaction, transaction line items, journals. and journal line items. Validation rules that interfere with the posting of year end journals and documents might need to be temporarily disabled.

Generating Default Year End Playbook Templates

You can generate the default year end playbook template using the Create or Restore a Default Year End Playbook Template action on the Manage Accounting Playbooks page. For more information, see Managing Accounting Playbooks.

Using the Year End Playbook Template

You can use the Year End Playbook Template to generate new year end playbooks. For more information, see Managing Accounting Playbooks.

By default the year end playbook templates might contain the following additional information:

• In the App Location 1 and App Location 2 fields, the links of apps to perform tasks generated from the task template. For example, a link to the automated elimination record.
• In the Report Location 1 and Report Location 2 fields, the links to reports that will be used to perform the task generated from this task template.
• In the Note 1 and Note 2 fields, any important notes for the assignee to perform the generated task.

You can add further comments and instructions in the Note fields. You can expand these templates by adding further App Location, Report Location, and Note fields using the Object Manager.

Validating Playbooks Generated from the Default Year End Playbook Template

If you have created a playbook from the default year end playbook template, you can run a validation process that checks whether the requirements for each task have been met.

The validation process does not affect the task's status and can only be run on tasks with the status "Not Started".

Note:

The Check Custom Validations task is not validated by this process. You must work with your administrator to manually complete this task.

Year End Tasks Validations

Task	Validation
Suspense and Retained Earnings GLAs	The following fields must be populated: Suspense GLA Retained Earnings GLA Warning: We do not validate that these fields are correctly populated, only that they are populated. You must check that the correct GLAs are being used.
Document Status	There are no documents pending for the selected year. If you run this validation a long time in advance of the year end, you should run it again before running the year end process, to ensure that there are still no documents pending for the year.
Special Period Status	The special periods 000 and 101 exist, and period 000 is open for the following year.
Previous Year Adjustments	There are no pending adjustments for previous years.
Previous Year Status	The previous years have been closed.

Notes:

The validation process cannot validate any custom tasks.

If you make changes to an accounting playbook generated from a default year end template, those changes cannot be validated. For example, if you add custom tasks, those tasks are not validated.

The default tasks are always validated for their original requirements regardless of the changes you make.

You can run the validation process as many times as required.

To validate your tasks:

1. On the Accounting Playbooks list view, open the playbook that you want to validate.
2. On the Accounting Playbook, click Validate.

The validation process runs in the background. When the process finishes, the playbook description is updated with the date and time that the validation was run, and the Validation field on the tasks is updated. You can then review the tasks and update their status, if required.