Financial lock can be used by business owners and Accountant - Full Access users to help close the books after a fiscal period is completed, especially after completing a tax filing. Financial lock, once activated, stops changes being made to your invoices, invoice payments, and expenses during a past period. This ensures your financial data is not inadvertently changed once the period has been reviewed and locked. Financial lock can also be unlocked anytime to make changes as needed.
Financial Lock
To activate financial lock, use the below steps as an owner or an Accountant - Full Access user:
- Go directly to Accounting preferences here, or select the Settings section
- Under Advanced Preferences, select Accounting
- The Lock Date is by default set to your Fiscal Year End date if it’s your first time activating, or to the previously set lock date set - if needed, adjust to any past date before today
- Slide the toggle next to Financial Lock to turn it on, the changes will save automatically.
![SettingsAccountingFinancialLock.png]()
When financial lock is activated, the following actions are deactivated:
Expenses
| Active and Archived Expenses | Quick Expenses | Deleted Expenses |
|
Unavailable actions:
|
Unavailable actions:
|
Unavailable actions:
|
Invoices
| Draft Invoices |
Sent or Viewed Invoices
| Deleted Invoices |
|
Unavailable actions:
|
Unavailable actions:
|
Unavailable actions:
|
Note: Draft invoices do not appear in reports until sent by email, marked as sent, shared via link, or until a payment is applied to the invoice. As a result, these actions, along with editing, are unavailable when draft invoices are locked to ensure your reports remain accurate.
Invoice Payments
| Invoice Payments |
|
Unavailable actions:
|
FAQs
How do I close the books at the end of the fiscal year?
FreshBooks moves Net Income from prior fiscal years into Retained Earnings on the Balance Sheet automatically. You can use the below options to manage your books:
- Set a Fiscal Year End in your basic information settings to get additional date range filters in your reports (especially if you have a year end date that is different from Dec 31)
- View the amounts for each fiscal period by running most accounting reports filtered to a specific date range, historical reports can also be run to view prior period amounts and to make adjustments any time
- Export your accounting reports periodically to save offline copies to use for comparison
- Lock your invoices and expenses to prevent changes after closing the books