Accounting period lock — close a month so nothing here can change it
Section 01
Why lock a period
1 minute
Once your accountant has closed August — VAT filed, stock valued, the management accounts sent — a receipt booked on the 28th, a customer payment dated the 20th or a voided invoice quietly changes numbers that have already been reported. Brytebuild feeds those numbers to Xero and Sage (invoices, receipts, purchase bills, cost-of-sales journals), and every accounting system has a lock date for exactly this reason: Xero's period and adviser lock dates, Sage's year-end lockdown, QuickBooks' closing date, Odoo's lock dates, Business Central's allowed posting range and closed inventory periods. This is Brytebuild's.
Section 02
The two dates
2 minutes
| Date | Who it binds | Use it for |
|---|---|---|
| Lock for everyone except company admins | Every user except the company owner and roles with company settings access (the same people who may move the dates). Xero calls this the period lock date; Sage gives the same people an override permission. | The last day of the most recently closed month. Move it forward each month-end. Admins can still post an accountant's adjustment into it. |
| Lock for everyone, admins included | Everybody, the owner too. Xero's adviser lock date. | The last filed year-end. Nothing is posted on or before it by anyone. |
Both are on or before dates. Either can be moved forwards or backwards by a company admin — there is deliberately no irreversible lock, because one wrong click would be permanent — and every change is written to the audit log with the old and new values and shown on the card as Last changed … by …. A company with neither date set behaves exactly as before.
Section 03
What is refused
2 minutes
Anything with a financial effect whose own date falls on or before the lock that applies to you:
| Action | The date that is checked |
|---|---|
| Every stock movement — goods receipt, consumption, works-order completion, waste, adjustment, stock take, transfer, despatch, return | The movement's time. Movements are dated now, so this bites only on offline shop-floor actions replayed with a pressed time inside the locked month — the same rule Business Central applies to a closed inventory period: no value change of any kind. |
| Issuing an invoice or credit note | The issue date, and the tax point where one was set — a tax point inside a closed month would move VAT into it. Refused before a number is allocated, so nothing is burned. |
| Recording a customer receipt; voiding one | The payment's received date — the one AR entry you can backdate. Voiding reverses the receipt on its own date, so a receipt inside the lock cannot be voided either. |
| Goods-in with a supplier invoice date | The supplier's invoice date — the purchase bill Sage receives is dated on it. |
| Keying an exchange rate | The rate's date — a rate keyed for a closed month would re-value that month's unvalued documents. The feed catching up never re-values a locked month either. |
A refusal reads as a sentence, wherever it happens: “Your books are locked up to 31 Aug 2026. Receipt RCPT-2026-00002 dated 20 Aug 2026 cannot be posted. Post it dated after the lock, or ask a company admin to move the lock date under Settings → Compliance.” A refused payment stays as an editable draft, so you can change its date and record it again.
Section 04
Day to day
1 minute
At each month-end, once the accountant confirms the month is closed in Xero or Sage, move the first date to the last day of that month. When the year-end accounts are filed, move the second date to the year-end. If a genuine correction to a closed month is needed, the admin posts it (first lock) or moves the date back, posts, and moves it forward again — all of which is on the audit log. Keep the lock here in step with the one in your accounts: Xero and Sage refuse the same postings on their side, and a document that passes here but is refused there shows as a failed sync in Settings → Integrations.
Per-user posting ranges (Business Central); an irreversible lock (Odoo's hard lock); a separate “exceptions to closing date” report beyond the audit log; automatic month-end locking; locking the Xero or Sage side from here.