Period Locking

In accounting and bookkeeping, 'locking' a period means that no new transactions can be entered in that period and no existing transactions can be edited. In practice, this is to ensure that once official accounting results (e.g. tax return, VAT return) have been filed in respect of a particular period, the figures simply cannot change.

Some accounting packages have formal 'periods' which run in parallel to the actual date of transactions. There might be different periods for VAT accounting and corporate accounting and they can be opened/closed independently.

The implementation of locking in Pakk is simpler - there are no 'periods' for you to set up, track and eventually lock. In order to stop transactions being entered/edited on the system before a certain date, you simply specify a lock journal to date in Account Settings > Accounting. If no date is specified, there is no lock on accounting entries. Once you specify a date, no changes to the journal (either manual or system generated) can be made prior to that date.

The journal lock is only accessible to account owners, which means that temporarily unlocking the journal (for example, to enter a missing transaction) cannot be done by anyone other than an account owner.