The FrontAccounting Fiscal Years admin function needs some improvement.
I have been using FrontAccounting for several years and one of the things that has annoyed me is that the Fiscal Years admin function is difficult to use and limited in functionality.
At first glance it appears to be able to do anything you could want it to, but you will quickly find (and an inspection of the code will confirm) that the validation will not allow you to change the year start, and the year end must be the year start plus one year less a day, so you can enter anything you like but there is only one valid combination.
This has two problems:
Firstly the UI is overly complicated if there is only one possible valid entry – just have an ‘Add Year’ button.
Secondly, it is not possible to change the year start, which is an issue for regions that have a financial year that is different to the calendar year. Like here in Australia where the financial year is July 1st to June 30th. There are lots of other situations where being able to set this is a requirement. I have seen several forum posts with people asking about this and the usual answer was to change the value with SQL. While this is certainly possible, I am not really comfortable recommending people (possibly with limited technical skills) directly making changes to an accounting database.
My Fiscal Years Replacement extension addresses both of these issues.
I have replaced the start and end date fields with a single button to add a new year, which is a much simpler UI, with the identical functionality.
If there is only one fiscal year (and no transactions) the start date can be changed to whatever is required (the end date will be set to the start date plus a year less one day). Once transactions have been entered (or there is more than one fiscal year) the start date is fixed and can not be changed.
The module can be downloaded from:
https://github.com/PaulShipley/admin_fiscalyear
Install by copying to [fa root dir]/modules, then install Fiscal Year Replacement extension and activating it for company(s).
Refer to:
http://frontaccounting.com/fawiki/index.php?n=Help.InstallActivateExtensions
There will be a Fiscal Years Replacement entry on the right hand side of Company Setup under the Setup tab. Note that the original Fiscal Years function remains ‘as is’ and is still present.