How Anterra Handles Accounting Dates
For virtually all information available in Anterra we store two dates, the transaction date and the accounting date. The transaction date is usually when the transaction itself was entered into the accounting system, but is not necessarily when it becomes a matter of financial record. There are numerous situations where a transaction is entered in the first few days of a month but should be considered as part of the prior accounting period.
Dates in Acumatica:
Generally, in Acumatica there are four dates associated with most transactions:
- Date of the document - Most of the time this is inside the Period, but there are times when it's not. This is the date used for things like AR Invoices / AP Bills, and this is also the date used when it is between the start and end date of the period which allows Anterra to work on not just month-ends.
- Period of association - Unfortunately it is not possible in Acumatica to associate an actual accounting date, instead only a period can be associated. If we only relied on the period, all transactions would be on the first of last day of the period, by using the Period and the Date we are able to provide the best experience.
- Creation date - This is the date we use for our transaction dates which allows us to understand when the record was originally created
- Update date - We use this date behind-the-scenes to validate that we have the latest information from Acumatica when we're running our automated validations