The closing of the fiscal year as far as a company or individual is concerned refers to the adjustment of the accounts and the presentation of the results in order to proceed to the payment of the corresponding taxes.
The first is the calculation at the end of the accounting year, which lasts one year and coincides with the calendar year, from January 1 to December 31. On the other hand, the fiscal closing is carried out once the accounting closing is finished, and with the annual accounts already settled, the tax filing will be made.
What are the implications of the year-end closing?
The accounting closing is done from January 1 to March 31. During this period, all the accounts are prepared in order to close the accounts and proceed to their presentation.
Performing this closing as soon as possible will bring several advantages, for example, it will facilitate decision making with financial implications. By knowing the current situation of the company earlier, decisions such as the distribution of dividends or the allocation of reserves can be made earlier and more accurately.
In addition, knowing the result of the accounting close as soon as possible also makes it possible to guide decision making towards tax reductions. Knowing the amounts of VAT (value added tax) and personal income tax, it will be possible to make certain investments that reduce these percentages.
How to perform the year-end closing in Odoo?
Knowing the advantages of being able to close the accounts as soon as possible, it is clear the need for an accounting system that can speed up these processes. In Odoo, thanks to its integrations and the intuitive nature of the system, the closing can be done in a matter of seconds.
To begin with, thanks to the digitalization of the invoices, the system will already have all the necessary information about the invoicing during the fiscal year. Moreover, thanks to Odoo's amortization and depreciation system, this will not be a concern either, as the journal entries will be posted fully automatically.
The first advantage of using Odoo when it comes to closings is that it is not necessary to perform a closing as such in the system to be able to see the company's situation at any point in time, whether it is the current year or past fiscal years.
However, you will be able to perform the accounting closing in a very simple way:
1. Once the year ends, Odoo will automatically send the expense accounts to the profit and loss account 129. That is to say, there will be no need to make any movement entries from one account to another. This can be seen both in the balance sheet and in the trial balance, once the year is over, the result of the year will be completed by Odoo. Likewise, if we access the profit and loss result, Odoo will also have entered the closing in it automatically.
In this case, at the beginning of the following year, account 129 will already be operating with the previous year's result.
2. Later in the year, usually around June/July, it will be necessary to make the apportionment once we have the final closing. Once we decide where we want to place the previous year's profit or loss, we can proceed to create the journal entry.
Accessing the accounting entries from the accounting application, we will create an entry manually. On one side the account 129 with the amount of the result of our fiscal year on the debit side and on the other side the account 120 of retained earnings on the credit side.
3. In this way, it will remain balanced until the distribution is decided, in this case, for example, we can create an accounting entry to move the remainder of the account 120 to the social fund 101. In this way, we will already have our closing and the distribution done.
In this way, we can close our accounting and fiscal year in a matter of seconds, thanks also to the connection with the Immediate Supply of Information (SII). Once the accounting year is closed, no further action is needed to start the new year.
Accounting and Tax Closing in Spain