7.10.1 Changing your Financial Year

u3as can decide to change their Financial Years for various reasons. This has implications for Beacon depending on how much a u3a relies on Beacon for Financial accounting. Note the Beacon Team cannot advise on other aspects, such as a U3A's Constitution, the Charities Commission and HMRC. The u3a.org.uk site has an Advice section to help in these areas.

If your u3a does not use or rely on Beacon to prepare your accounts i.e. by using the Beacon Financial Statement, then changing the Financial Year will have little impact. The Beacon Ledger will still record membership fees along with any transactions you add manually.

If you rely on the Financial Statement in Beacon then there are some considerations to be aware of and actions to take. It might be a good idea to ask Beacon Support to allocate you a volunteer Supporter to work with you - start with opening a support ticket.

The Financial Statement will generate a statement based on a 12 month period as defined by the Financial Year (FY) setting, or up to the current date for the current FY. As soon as the date of the FY is changed for your site Beacon will generate a 12 month report based on the new FY. This will have the effect of making the Financial Statement meaningless for previous years.

The change will mean that the current FY will either be shorter or longer. If the current year is shorter then it is a little easier to manage in Beacon, so if it's moving by 6 months go for a 6 month year rather than an 18 month one - these are the minimum and maximum length of a single year allowed by the Charities Commission/HMRC.

Bringing your Financial Year start forward

To give an example, if the FY is changed from 1st April to 1st January then the current year will become 9 months and the following steps need to be adopted: -

• Get your accounts in order towards the end of December and in good time stop all new transactions i.e. adding/renewing members and manually entering other items.
• Produce a Financial Statement with Beacon for the "current year" and exclude (a tick box) the previous year. This will be for 9 months. Keep it safe - Beacon can never produce this again after the FY setting is changed.
• Next arrange with Beacon Support (raise a ticket) to change you FY before 31st December. On 1st January Beacon will roll over the balances.
• Financial Statements moving forward will give you reports January to December.

Putting your Financial Year start backward

After 12 months Beacon will bring forward balances and this makes things a little more tricky. Assume an example where the FY is moved from January thru December to April thru March.

• Do nothing until March before the change starts. Beacon will bring forward balances on 1st January as usual.
• Get your accounts in order towards the end of March and in good time stop all new transactions i.e. adding/renewing members and manually entering other items.
• Produce a Financial Statement with Beacon for the "current year" and include (select the tick box) the previous year. This will be for 15 months. Keep it safe - Beacon can never produce this after the FY setting is changed.
• Next arrange with Beacon Support (raise a ticket) to change your FY. On 1st April Beacon will roll over the balances (again). Note this can be neither prevented nor delayed.
• Financial Statements moving forward will give you reports April to March.

Revision History

v1	2020-06	Graham Tigg	First version.
v2	2021-01-05	Graham Tigg	Improved wording in places and adding links to raise a ticket
v3	2021-04-22	Lyn Bossons	Renamed 7.10.1