Though the General Ledger Year End Close Routine is only a once-a-year process, it can be a daunting task. Especially if you close to divisional retained earnings accounts in GP. This can happen when you have significant growth and added several new divisions within the past year.
When it’s time to run the General Ledger Year-End Close process, you:
- Check your accounts for the correct Posting Type and Typical Balance.
- Post any unposted batches.
- Close your Fiscal Periods for the year you are closing.
- Take a database backup.
You follow the prescribed steps in your Year End Close documentation, and you click the ‘Close Year’ button only to have the following message appear:
Missed Retained Earnings
You thought you had all of your new retained earning accounts set up, but you must have missed one. There are a couple of articles that document why you might receive this message. (found here: or ). However, they don’t provide a quick and easy method for finding the divisions that do NOT have a retained earnings account setup.
To find the divisions that are not set up with a retained earnings account, you can run the following SQL script against your company database in Management Studio:
Select distinct (ACTNUMBR_1) from GL00100 where actnumbr_1
not in (Select distinct (ACTNUMBR_1)
from GL00100 where ACTNUMBR_2 = '3030')
This script assumes that segment 1 is the division that you are closing to in General Ledger Setup, that segment 2 is your account, and 3030 is the account number you use for retained earnings. You can substitute the appropriate values for the segments and the number for retained earnings to get this script to work for you. If you have the Fabrikam company installed in GP, you can use the script as it is to test it in Fabrikam.
If you would like to see the divisions that are set up with the 3030 retained earnings account, here is the script for that:
Select distinct (ACTNUMBR_1)
from GL00100 where ACTNUMBR_2 = '3030'
This works in Fabrikam and has the same assumptions as the prior script.
Creating those Retained Earnings
The next step is to create those new retained earnings accounts in GP. That can be done in the Account Maintenance window (Cards | Financial | Account), and once you get them created, you should be able to close the year in GL without receiving that error message.
Note: A comprehensive article from Microsoft regarding the year-end close processes throughout the software can be found here: .
Check out these blogs too:
