Closing the working paper
Once you have cleared the bank (Briefcase Ledger only), posted all pending invoices & adjustments and reconciled all accounts, you are ready to close the working paper. If there are any outstanding actions to take, you will see this in the top section of the working paper. Otherwise, if the working paper is ready to be closed, you will see this:
Click "Close period". This will bring up a confirmation modal, confirming that this is what you want to do.
Click "Close period" on the modal to confirm. You will need the "Working Papers - Manage Periods" permission to do this.
When closing the period, Briefcase will run a series of checks to ensure that the ledger data hasn't drifted since each account was reconciled.
For example, let's say you reconciled the VAT account with a balance of £10,000. If we detect that the account balance is now £10,500 in Xero, we would block closing the working paper and automatically unreconcile the VAT account as it has drifted and now needs to be reviewed and reconciled again.
If all checks pass, the working paper will be closed successfully. Briefcase will create an immutable point-in-time snapshot of the balance sheet which you will be able to reference in the future.
Note that for Briefcase Ledger, closing the period will also automatically set the client's GL lock date to the end of the working paper period.
Viewing a closed working paper
You can view any previous working papers in the "closed" section on the working papers page:
Click "View working paper" to see the closed working paper snapshot.
Here you will see the balance sheet accounts. This data is taken from the snapshot of each account, rather than from the ledger. Therefore if you retroactively update one of these accounts after the working paper is closed, you will not see the change here.
You can also see who reconciled each account in the "Reconciled by" column.
You can click into any of the balance sheet accounts to see more details of the reconciliation of the account.
For each account, we also show an "audit trail" where you can view who made each change to the account and when the change was made:
Exporting a working paper
Once a working paper has been closed, you can export it into an excel pack. To do this, open the closed working paper and click "Export" in the top right.
This will download a ZIP file containing the working paper as an Excel workbook (WorkingPapers.xslx), a README and the supporting documents attached to the working paper.
Reopening a working paper
You are able to reopen a closed working paper, provided that there is not already another open working paper. To do this, click "Reopen period" from the closed working paper view:
This will bring up a confirmation modal. Once you have confirmed, this will reopen the working paper period. Now you can make changes to the working paper again.