Closing a fiscal year sets a lock: its transactions, its expenses and its opening balances stop being editable. That is deliberate. Financial statements may have been produced from those figures and handed to co-owners; they must not move under the people who read them.
The lock is not an archive, though. A correction is still possible, in three moves.
Correcting the transaction
- Open Accounting and select the year in the toolbar.
- Open the Fiscal year actions menu and choose Reopen Year.
- Make the correction: the date, the amount, the category, the unit.
- Close the year again.
While the year is closed, the entry dialog stops you and says what to do: "Fiscal year 2024 is closed: it no longer accepts entries, and saving will be refused. Reopen the year or choose a date inside an open year."
The same warning appears when you change a transaction's date to one that would move it into a closed year — easy to miss, since the year you are looking at is open.
If the following year is closed too
Reopening is never refused: any closed year reopens. It is the re-close that stops you, with this message: "Fiscal year 2025 is already closed. Reopen it before closing fiscal year 2024."
The reason is the chain. Each year carries forward the previous year's closing balances. Re-closing 2024 with new figures while 2025 is already closed would leave 2025 sitting on opening balances that are no longer right.
So the order is: reopen 2025 then 2024, correct, close 2024 then 2025. Reopen newest first, close in the other direction.
Closing cleanly again
Closing is a four-step wizard: checks, bank balances, accounts payable, summary.
Two things deserve attention on the way through.
The calculated balance. CondoAide shows its own position — "Calculated by CondoAide" — beside the bank balance you enter, and names the difference fund by fund. A difference is not necessarily an error, but it does have to be explained, and the wizard asks you to confirm that you have done so before closing.
The no-budget warning. If the year has no budget, the wizard warns that the difference will not become a receivable. It does not block: it tells you the result will not be the one you expect. That is the subject of the budget guide.
If the positions moved while the wizard was open, it asks you to re-run the checks rather than close on stale figures.
The common case: a deposit banked the following year
Contributions for October to December banked the following January produce exactly the difference the closing wizard will show you: the ledger says one number, the bank says another, lower by the deposit.
That is not an error, it is a deposit in transit. Two clean ways out:
Move the deposit to its real date. Reopen the year, change the date to the actual banking date — the transaction moves into the following year by itself — then close again. The calculated balance then matches the bank and there is no difference left to explain.
Keep the amount in the year it relates to. Leave the transaction on its original date and carry the ledger balance into the next year's opening. The amounts stay in the year they belong to, and the difference at 31 December is a deposit in transit that bank reconciliation accounts for.
The choice is yours: no law requires a syndicate to keep accrual-basis books. What matters is that the same choice is made every year, and that the difference is explained rather than endured.