You can always click on Sage 50 Accounting - Canadian Edition at the top of this page and review the pinned article under Announcements News ,and Alerts called Sage 50 Year end Tips.

Year ends depend on the type of year end.

Calendar year end (always Dec 31) has payroll issues (each employee's payroll resets to zero income, etc.).

Fiscal year end can be any month for any given corporation or Dec 31 for proprietorships and I believe partnerships as well.  This is more of a tax year end.  Each income statement zeros for the new year and Current earnings will transfer to Retained Earnings on the balance sheet.

I don't "print" all the reports recommended.  I take a backup to make sure I have a copy as at year end and sometimes create pdfs.  That doesn't mean you shouldn't but I find it too early to deal with T4's so I don't do them until a few weeks into January usually.

For either year end, get a backup.

If your fiscal and calendar years are different, select Maintenance, Start New Year (pick Calendar) or just move the session date to a date in January.  The program will process the payroll to previous year for you.

If your fiscal and calendar years are the same, select Maintenance, Start New Year and the program will start a new year for both.  Both payroll and fiscal year reporting will move to previous years.

Don't forget to update the TD1 Claim amounts (Premium and Higher on the Maintenance menu) and WSIB/WCB rates if they changed (also Maintenance menu).  Pro users must make both these changes on an employee by employee basis.  Also, if you are doing payroll and are on a payroll subscription, you will need to install the update for 2022.1 that came out last week.

Richard S. Ridings Thank you for a prompt response. That makes more sense. The calendar year and fiscal years are different, I have changed the session date to January and in the process it made me change the calendar year already, so all I need to do now is the payroll update and TD1/WSIB if needed, if I'm understanding correctly!?

Just to clarify, when you change the Session Date in Sage 50 you are telling the program what you think "TODAY" is.  If you use a 2021 date, the program thinks it is 2021.  If you change it to 2022, it thinks, I guess I better get you ready for 2022.  It's purpose is to give you date-related warnings and to know the time frame to handle things like payroll and fiscal years.

If you move the Session Date to 2022 for the first time, the program will immediately transition any payroll information to a previous year and stop allowing automatic calculations in payroll for 2021.  If you then move the Session Date back to 2021, you will not be able to do automatic payroll calculations (unless Sage changed this in the last couple of versions).

When you say

Ashton D. said:

and in the process it made me change the calendar year already

When you changed the Session Date to the new calendar year, it was you changing the date to the new year, not the program forcing you to change the year when you changed the Session Date to the new year.  If you think logically, there is no way to change a date from one year to another without changing the calendar year.  The Session Date change to the new calendar year triggered the archiving of payroll.  There is no other trigger.

Ashton D. said:

so all I need to do now is the payroll update and TD1/WSIB if needed, if I'm understanding correctly!?

Yes that is correct.