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SStandShare

Understanding ledger periods

Admin Treasurer

StandShare organizes the organization ledger into periods — spans of time, typically a fiscal year or season, during which new entries can be added. When a period closes, its entries are locked and a new period begins with the same balances rolled forward.

This page explains why periods exist, what closing a period actually does, and how the model protects your historical books.

Why periods?​

Without periods, every correction, adjustment, or reversal lives in one infinite stream. Two things get hard:

  • Historical accuracy. Last year's totals change if someone edits last year's entries. Your audit report stops matching what you filed.
  • Reporting boundaries. "How did we do in FY 2025?" is hard to answer when the ledger has no native concept of "FY 2025."

A period gives the org a durable slice of time. Once it is closed, its totals are immutable, and reports against that period always produce the same answer.

The lifecycle​

A ledger period moves through two states:

  1. Active — entries can be written. Exactly one period is active at any given time. All settlement payouts, scholarship disbursements, fund transfers, and manual adjustments land in this period.
  2. Closed — entries are read-only. No writes accepted. The period remains visible for reporting, exports, and drill-down.

Your org always has zero or one active period. When you close the active period, a new period is created automatically (or you name it yourself) so day-to-day bookkeeping continues without a gap.

What carry-forward means​

When you close a period, StandShare does one bookkeeping step: it writes an opening balance entry into the new period for every ledger account, equal to that account's ending balance in the period you just closed.

Example — the Westlake booster club's General Fund ends FY 2025 with $14,822.50:

  • Last entry in FY 2025 leaves the General Fund at $14,822.50.
  • Closing FY 2025 creates a new FY 2026 period.
  • FY 2026 opens with a single carry-forward entry on the General Fund for $14,822.50.
  • Every subsequent credit and debit in FY 2026 stacks on top of that opening balance.

Family accounts, fund accounts, and org accounts all carry forward the same way. Nothing is lost — the numbers simply get a fresh period to live in.

Why this matters for settlement and scholarships​

The ledger write guard means:

  • Settlement commits, scholarship disbursements, fund transfers, and manual adjustments all require an active period. If there is no active period, these actions fail with a clear error.
  • Once a period is closed, those same actions cannot be backdated into it. Corrections have to be booked in the active period as a corrective entry — usually with a note in the description pointing back to the underlying issue.

This is the accounting equivalent of "close the books": no revisions to past periods, only adjusting entries in the current one.

What closing does NOT do​

  • It does not delete any entries.
  • It does not archive or move data to cold storage — closed-period entries are still fully queryable on the Org Ledger page and in reports.
  • It does not produce a tax return or a GAAP-compliant financial statement on its own. Your treasurer still runs the reports and prepares filings.

Closing is a boundary, not an export.

When to close​

Most orgs close a period at:

  • Fiscal year end — aligns with 990 prep, annual reports, and tax filings.
  • Season boundary — for single-season booster clubs, closing at the end of the season gives a clean per-season record.
  • Leadership change — closing when the treasurer changes hands makes it obvious which numbers belong to which regime.

There is no requirement to close on any schedule. Some orgs run a single long-lived period forever and only close when they really need a boundary.

Guardrails​

  • Audit log. Every create, rename, and close is recorded with the acting user and a timestamp.
  • Permissions. Only users with Ledger: Manage (Org Admin and Treasurer by default) can close a period.
  • Settlement-in-progress block. If a settlement commit is running when you try to close, StandShare rejects the close with a 409 so you do not land partial data on one side of the period boundary.