Accounting periods overview

You only need to define accounting periods if your company follows non-standard accounting periods. The system creates standard accounting periods when you create your company.

What's an accounting period?

An accounting period selection is more like an accounting period structure. It sets the basic structure of the accounting calendar for Intacct. Within the structure there are the actual periods defined by the selection. There are two choices:

  • Standard: This is a standard annual calendar from Jan-1 to Dec-31. All standard periods, including those with a different first fiscal month within begin on the 1st and end on the last day of the month. The system can create standard accounting periods for you, from which you can adjust the first fiscal month and first tax month. Standard accounting periods can be thought of as dynamic, because the dates change based on the current date.
  • Custom: This is a custom accounting calendar defined by the user, in which you can use any day to define the “first of the year." You can define all the periods within the year to begin and end based on your organization's requirements. This is typically used for "4-4-5"-type calendars used by restaurants, retail, or other businesses with unique needs. Each and every year must be defined. You can define as many years going forward as you like. Custom accounting periods can be thought of as static because they are fixed date ranges and don't depend on the current date.

How accounting periods affect reporting periods

Reporting periods use accounting periods to set the range used when you create the report. That is, custom and standard reporting periods affect reports. For example, if you use standard accounting periods, report data will start on Jan 1 and end on the month, quarter, or year end unless you specify a different fiscal first month. Fiscal first month (fiscal first period) is only available when your company uses standard accounting periods.

About using first fiscal month

If your company is using standard accounting periods, you can set the first fiscal month to be any month in the standard calendar. Because each standard fiscal period starts on the first of the month, your fiscal year will start on the first of the month you select as the first fiscal month. The default is to start in January, but you can change it to any month.

If you set a first fiscal month, Sage Intacct creates these periods as well, adding FISCAL-- to the beginning of the accounting period name. First fiscal months are used to set reporting ranges. First tax month doesn't affect reporting.

Selecting a first fiscal month affects reporting. When you choose a fiscal reporting period in a report, the report results are based on the setting of the first fiscal month.

For example, suppose you set your first fiscal period to July and then run a report using the “as-of” date of Nov 17, 2025.

  • If you use Fiscal‑‑Current Year, the report will contain data from July 1, 2025 to June 30, 2026 because that's the fiscal year that includes Nov 17, 2025.
  • If you use Current Year, the report will contain data from Jan 1, 2025 to Dec 31, 2025 because that's the calendar year that includes Nov 17, 2025.

About standard accounting periods

Choosing standard accounting periods provides a standard annual accounting period calendar from Jan 1 to Dec 31. All periods begin on the 1st and end on the last day of the month.

System reporting periods are created automatically when you request them. When setting a first fiscal month, the system creates those as well.

To create the default system accounting periods:

You don't need to do anything special to create system accounting periods. They are created when you set up your company and select Standard accounting periods.

Accounting periods directly affect reporting periods when creating reports.

To create default reporting periods:

  1. Go to Company > Setup > Import data.
  2. Select the Default link for reporting periods. This creates reporting periods for the Months, Quarters, and Calendar Years based on the dates of posted transactions. It creates reporting periods through one year past the current year if there are no future-dated transactions. These reporting periods can be set up to be used for budgeting and are in addition to the System Reporting periods like Current Month.
Reporting periods that will be used for budgeting cannot overlap. You can import or manually add additional Reporting periods and these can have start and end dates that aren't related to calendar months.

When using System Reporting periods such as Current Month in financial reports, the period end date is correctly displayed. However, the first column header is displayed as “Month Ending.” Best practice is to change Column Heading 1 to “Period Ending” or “Start of Date Range” because “Month Ending” is misleading for a custom environment.

About non-standard accounting periods

Some companies, such as grocery stores and manufacturing operations, have strict weekly operation cycles because they must use four-week months to ensure that their financials do not vary from month to month. During setup, such companies can make the following choices:

  • Thirteen months in a year.
  • One month that contains five weeks.
  • One of the four quarters contains four months.

Other companies might have reporting months that begin on the 15th day of the first month and end on the 14th day of the next.

Create non-standard accounting periods to perform certain calculations accordingly. Examples are the way the system calculates budgets and the dates when the system posts automatically created summaries. For details, go to Effects of choosing non-standard accounting periods.

Reporting periods are named date ranges and can be used in financial reports. Reporting periods relate only tangentially to accounting periods. Generally, however, you will have at least one reporting period for each accounting period.

Define a custom accounting period

During company creation, select Custom in the Accounting periods dropdown list (Setup Wizard > Company tab). Then, go to Company > Setup > Settings > Accounting periods and define your non-standard periods.

If you already created a company using system reporting periods by selecting Standard in this tab, and you need custom reporting periods, you need to start an entirely new company. If you already have data in your company when you realize this, contact Customer Service to assist you in migrating your data.

Effects of choosing non-standard accounting periods

List of accounting periods

If you chose custom accounting periods in the Company tab of the setup wizard when you initially created your company, the ability to define these periods is enabled. Access to this function is available by pointing to Company > Setup > Settings > Accounting periods. Otherwise, this function is disabled.

GL transactions

A GL transaction (created either within GL or from subledgers) can't be saved unless the date of the transaction falls within one an existing custom accounting period (non-standard accounting months). Best practice is to create a custom accounting period for the next year so that you can create transactions when next year comes around. If you haven’t yet defined the custom accounting period for next “year”, you won't be able to create transactions when next year is reached. In this case, create a custom accounting period for the year that includes the posting date and then post the transaction again.

Auto summaries

If you chose monthly auto summaries, the system posts the summary entry on the last day of the accounting period, as compared with the last day of the calendar month. In addition, the summary names are derived from the user-defined custom accounting period.

Company info

If you use non-standard accounting periods, the First Fiscal Month specified on the Company Information page becomes irrelevant. The first month specified in the Accounting Period Information page becomes the first fiscal month.

The First Tax Month field is not affected because tax computation and filing and tax are based only on calendar months.

Budgets

Budgets are based on assumptions such as (a) a month contains 28-31 days, (b) when an annual budget is distributed over months, they are allocated equal amounts, (c) a quarter has 88-92 days, (d) when an annual budget is distributed over quarters, they are allocated equal amounts, (e) when a monthly budget is extrapolated to quarters and years, it is multiplied by 3 and 12 respectively, (f) a year has 365 days, and so on. Depending on the way you configure your non-standard accounting periods, these assumptions might become incorrect, producing results that vary according to how you have defined your accounting periods.

Standard reporting periods

Built-in reporting periods, such as Current Month, Current Quarter, Current Year, and so on are normally calculated based on a specified date, where the current date is the default. However, with non-standard accounting periods, reporting periods are calculated based on accounting period rather than calendar months. In certain cases, results can occur that are difficult to predict. For example, there is no guarantee that for One Year ago Quarter and One Year Ago Month the same date falls within the same month each year. Prior Year is also tricky in cases where the extra week that gets accumulated over three to four years is allocated to one of the months.

If you use custom accounting periods where leap years may not affect you as calendar year periods, it’s recommended to use Current year to date and a -1 offset when comparing the financial statement of the previous year (full period) with the statement for the current year.

Closing and opening of books

Choosing a non-standard accounting period does not directly affect the closing and opening of books because they are based on a reporting period, which effectively determines the date on which the books are closed. The system modifies the account forward totals to accommodate non-standard accounting periods.

You can't use Current Month or any of the built-in dynamic periods to close or open the books. Only named accounting periods are used. When you close books, use the smallest period that includes the entire period to close.

Consolidation

The Consolidation application is not directly affected because it performs automatic mapping of reporting periods based on dates and allows overriding of this default mapping in case the system does not guess the mapping correctly for you. Consequently, you may need to map the reporting periods.