Enhanced interface

Accounting periods overview

You need to define accounting periods only if your company follows non-standard accounting periods and custom periods are enabled. Intacct creates standard accounting periods when you create your company.

What's an accounting period?

Accounting periods set the basic structure of the accounting calendar for Intacct. Within the structure, there are either standard or custom periods.

Standard: This is a standard annual calendar from January 1 to December 31. All standard periods, including those with a different first fiscal month, begin on the first and end on the last day of the month.

Intacct 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 your system administrator. 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.

Custom periods are typically used for 4-4-5 type calendars used by restaurants, retail, or other businesses with unique needs. Each 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 there are fixed date ranges and do not 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. For example, you use standard accounting periods and report data starts on January 1 and ends 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 uses 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 that you select as the first fiscal month. The default is to start in January, but you can start on 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. When you select a fiscal reporting period in a report, the report results are based on the setting of the first fiscal month.

The first tax month does not affect reporting.

For example, 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

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

You do not need to do anything special to create standard accounting periods. They're created when you set up your company and select Standard accounting periods.

Accounting periods directly affect reporting periods when creating reports. For more information on reporting periods, see Learn about reporting periods.

About non-standard accounting periods

Some companies 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:

13 months in a year.
1 month that contains 5 weeks.
1 of the 4 quarters contains 4 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 Intacct calculates budgets and the dates when Intacct posts automatically created summaries. For details, go to Effects of using 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'll have at least one reporting period for each accounting period.

Effects of using non-standard accounting periods

The following sections describe how using non-standard accounting periods can affect different features in Intacct.

General Ledger transactions

A General Ledger transaction, created either within General Ledger or from subledgers, cannot be saved unless the date of the transaction falls within an existing custom accounting period. Best practice is to create custom accounting periods at least 1 year in advance so that you can create transactions when you reach that time frame. When you receive an error because the accounting period does not exist, create a custom accounting period for the year that includes the posting date. Then post the transaction again.

Auto summaries

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

Budgets

Budgets are based on assumptions, including the following:

A month contains 28-31 days.
When an annual budget is distributed over months, they're allocated equal amounts
A quarter has 88-92 days.
When an annual budget is distributed over quarters, they're allocated equal amounts.
When a monthly budget is extrapolated to quarters and years, it's multiplied by 3 and 12 respectively.
A year has 365 days.

Depending on how you configure your non-standard accounting periods, these assumptions can be incorrect, producing results that vary according to how you've defined your accounting periods.

Standard reporting periods

Built-in reporting periods, such as Current Month, Current Quarter, and Current Year, are normally calculated based on a specified date, where the current date is the default. With non-standard accounting periods, reporting periods are calculated based on the accounting period rather than calendar months.

In certain cases, results can occur that are difficult to predict. For example, there's 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 3 to four 4 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

Using a non-standard accounting period does not directly affect the closing and opening of books because they're based on a reporting period. This reporting period determines the date on which the books are closed. Intacct modifies the account forward totals to accommodate non-standard accounting periods.

You cannot 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

Custom accounting periods do not directly affect the Consolidation application. Consolidation performs automatic mapping of reporting periods based on dates and allows overriding of this default mapping in case Intacct does not correctly determine the mapping. Consequently, you might need to map the reporting periods.