Provisional Reply: When the Company is in consideration for sale, the Timelines., Last Date of Transactions etc. would be discussed and concluded at negotiations.

It is very important that when definite dates are available, these dates are immediately adjusted in IFS. The 1st step would be to correct/adjust the Accounting Periods in IFS to reflect the final dates of operation and the Final Period in the Financial Accounting Year.

You will certainly remove Access to the distant Accounting Period and delete them as those Accounting Periods will not be used.

There would be problems in deleting future Accounting Periods IF Accounting Transactions have been passed to future Accounting Periods. This could have happened due to the following two reasons:

1. Periodic Allocation to the future Period for Prepaid Expenses or Periodic Allocation of Accrued Revenue
2. Data Entry errors (wrong Voucher Dates)

In the above situation, each Sale of Business must be handled in detail and specifically, as the ERP is designed to handle and record ongoing Business Transactions and NOT Business Termination Transactions.

Finally, you should consider Accounting Periods for ANY possible Post Sales Transactions (Taxation, Audit etc.

If you need to talk to me on a specific case, maybe I can help you.! Please feel free to contact me

Mithila Ranjithan

Thank you  Mithila,  

The sale of the company is a change in ownership only.  The business will continue operating as before.  We just need to produce two sets of financial statements in 2023 for tax purposes.  Best case would be to have two 2023 Accounting Years.  The first would contain the periods up to the sale date and the second would cover from the sale until the end of the year.  Any other idea’s greatly appreciated.

We just went through something similar.  As Mithila is suggesting, we changed the end date of a period to the last date under old ownership.  We then had one period with 45 days or so and one with 15 days or so.  We did not close the year because it was a change in ownership, not operations.  This allows us to report through the end of the old ownership period, the new ownership period, and the year as a whole.

We are going through this process now but we do not have an advance date for completion as there is a third party involved which means the completion date could be identified mid-month. We can’t adjust the accounting period if there are transactions already recorded against it. There is no change to operations so the company must be able to continue to operate as normal. Does anyone have any ideas on how we could get round this issue?

Hi, 

If you have any postings in the current period (or future periods) a user cannot change the dates for the accounting periods.  This is especially troublesome if using period allocation where an expense is allocated to the future periods. 

Data repair has been done successfully by experienced SE who really know IFS Finance and have done these many times. I know some will claim to be able to fix, I've seen many bad results.  

Best regards, 

@Bill Lumb @ANNIEMALINS @Thomas Peterson 

We have performed this data repair several times for other customers who encountered a similar situation. I’m happy to discuss further details over a call if needed.

Thank you @Thomas Peterson and @Eranda I was concerned data repair would be our only option but hoped someone might have an alternative. Thank you for your replies.

We did end up with a data repair in this process because of reversing journals posted to one of the periods we needed to adjust.  I wouldn’t want to try to get around this - too much is touched behind the scenes.  IFS was responsive and met our short time frame (of course, the timeframe was a moving target until the very end).