Shepherd's Staff gives you the ability to reopen a closed finance year. When you close your finance year, it makes it so that you can no longer create, edit, or delete transactions from the finance year you just closed. While this is what you will want to do once you have finished entering all the transactions from that finance year, you might occasionally find that you missed a transaction from a previous finance year, or an adjustment needs to be made on a transaction from that year.
This feature should be used carefully. We recommend only using this utility if you have not yet issued reports for your new finance year. If you go back and make changes, you should prepare and issue new year-end reports to your congregation to accurately reflect the changes you have made. Otherwise, adjustments should be made in your current finance year to account for these changes.
It is highly recommended before you run this utility that you create a backup of your Shepherd's Staff database. For instructions on how to make a backup of your database, check out our article on Backing up your Database.
Note: Your login must have supervisor privileges' to the Finance module in order to run this utility.
- Click on the "Tools/Settings" tab in the Finance module, and then click on the radio button for "Reopen finance year 'XXXX'" where "XXXX" is your previous finance year, and then click "Start".
- A window will appear, reminding you to make a backup of your database. If you have already made a backup, click "Yes". If you have not made a backup yet, make a backup of your database, and then return to this window and click "Yes".
- A window will appear letting you know that you've reopened your previous finance year. Clicking OK will close the Finance module, and when you reopen the Finance module, you'll be in your new Finance year.