Concepts: Periods & Close

Why fiscal periods exist, the five states a period can hold, and how the month-end close turns your books into statements you can stand behind.

Financial statements only mean something if the numbers stop moving. Fiscal periods are how Horizon makes that true.

The Calendar and Its Periods

Your fiscal calendar (set in Setup) divides the year into periods — usually months. Every posted document lands in exactly one period, determined by its date. That’s what makes “the January numbers” a real, answerable question.

The Five States

“Open” and “closed” is the shape of it, but a period actually holds one of five states, and the two in the middle are the ones that matter at month-end.

State	What posts into it
Future	Nothing. The period hasn’t started.
Open	Anything. Normal life.
Soft close	Nothing, unless you hold the permission to post into a soft-closed period.
Hard close	Nothing. This is what the close checklist produces.
Locked	Nothing, permanently.

Soft close is the useful one. It stops ordinary posting while you review, without slamming the door — a controller who holds the permission can still post the adjusting entry the review turned up. Everyone else is refused. It is the state to sit in between “we’ve stopped transacting” and “we’re standing behind these numbers.”

Hard close is not permanent, and locked is. A hard-closed period can be reopened by a controller, who has to give a reason — so a genuine error found in March is correctable in March, on the record, rather than quietly. If your organization has authored an approval chain for reopen requests, the request routes for approval before anything moves; no such chain exists until you create one, so by default the reopen takes effect in the same step, with the reason and the requester recorded against it. A locked period is the end of the line; nothing reopens it.

The lock is the point: once a month is reviewed and signed off, no late entry silently changes what you reported. If something belongs to a closed month, you either post it to the current one — visibly, as accounting has always handled it — or reopen the period deliberately and leave the trail behind you.

The Close Is a Process, Not a Moment

Month-end in Horizon is a checklist you run from Period Close:

1. Finish the period’s business — post the stragglers, reconcile the bank, run depreciation.
2. Review — walk the working trial balance, post adjusting entries where the numbers need truing.
3. Tick the checklist — tasks with owners and evidence, so nothing relies on memory.
4. Close the period — the lock drops, and the statements for that month are yours to stand behind.