Blog - Are you ready for the year end?

December 31 is more than just New Year's EVE. The few extra steps you should take when you close EVE for the day will take you less time than it will take to read this blog post, but will save you hours next year.

Every year we get emails from customers asking us how to recreate data as of a date in the past. "What was my Inventory value on ….?" "What were my Accounts Receivable at the end of...?" "How can I go back and get a value for unused Gift Cards on….?"

Invariably these questions are prompted by your accountant asking for something they need to do your financial statements or file a tax report. Many of these values come directly from the reports and wizards provided within EVE.

The rest are usually calculated by exporting the relevant data to a spreadsheet from the current date back in time to the desired date. You then manually reverse all the transactions that have occurred. Effectively you are taking where you are today and backing out all the transactions to the historic value you need.

Whether December 31 is your fiscal year end or just the end of another month, it is wise to plan for reporting which you must do in the early months of 2017. Certain government and tax reporting is based upon a calendar year and ends on December 31 even if your accounting year ends on another date.

Accounting Back-ups take on a different meaning from the "In the unlikely event" backups we encourage you to take daily to protect your database.

Tech Tip: Accounting Backups

- During your end of day close on December 31 of every year, and on the last day of your fiscal accounting year if it is different, you should take an Accounting Backup. If you are hosted by EVE we take back-ups for you every day and store them where you can download them. If you are running locally you need to make sure you have a protocol which takes daily backups, but do an Accounting Backup as well.

- Once the backup is taken, take a copy of the backup and store it in a separate folder with a new name you can recognize, for instance Accounting_Backup_Dec2016. This way your Accounting Backup will not be overwritten by future EVE backups by mistake.

- All backups should be stored onto a hard drive or cloud based back-up device off your network.

- Important to Note: Regardless of whether you are hosted by us or running locally, you need to have a local copy of EVE installed on a PC in the shop which can run independently of your network. This is necessary for the next step, but also useful in the event you have a network failure or hardware malfunction on your main computer(s). Let’s call this your Backup Computer

- When your accountant asks for that special value as of December 31, you can restore your Accounting Backup to the copy of EVE on your Backup Computer. Your Backup Computer can now run EVE and provide all data ands reports as EVE was on December 31. No need to manually back out current year transactions on a spreadsheet. Meanwhile your staff is still running your current EVE database on your network computers without interruption.

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