Microsoft Dynamics GP Historical Year Reopening Notes

Historical year reopening could be required if you need to do multicurrency revaluation, or when you need to post GL correction transaction to the year, being not the most recent closed one.  There might be more reasons, you can name them, as real life could give unexpected surprises.  Historical year reopening should be done on MS SQL Server scripting level, this is why it is preferred that you are on SQL Server DB platform (not on Pervasive SQL, Ctree, or Btrieve, however even if you are on these archaic Great Plains versions, reopening is possible)
1. Try it on Test company, do not experiment on your production company database.  This is very critical, do not take the risk of compromising your accounting and even Corporate ERP system data
2. Moving GL History table to GL Open table.  For generic SQL programmer it should not be a challenge.  Both tables GL30000 (GL History) and GL20000 (GL Open) are very similar in their structure and your programmer should be able to compose Insert Into SQL statement
3. Marking Historical Year as Open.  This routine requires update in several GP company tables, we are not comfortable to release the instructions in open source publication, please call our office
4. Removing BBF journals.  If you are reopening historical year, you should remove P&L effect of GL year closing.  As excurse to accounting theory, when you are closing the year, all your P&L accounts are summarized out and sent to Retained Earning Account and recorded on the first day of the new year.  If you are reopening the historical year, you will need to close it at some point and the closing will recreate BBF (Balance Forward) GL transactions
5. Reconciling GL Accounts.  This is especially important if you are using FRx reports.  As you may know FRx connector to Dynamics GP General Ledger leans on GL Accounts summary tables.  And Reconciling Utility does in essence recalculation of GL account summary for each account
6. And now final steps – reopening historical year.  Here it is a bit difficult to guess which table to pick.  It is SY40101 Period Header.  All you need to do here is to mark HISTORYR (History Year) field as 0.  At this point, if you open window Financial Inquiry – former historical year should be available in the drop down list and vice versa it should now not be available in Historical Financial inquiry