Period Close & Maintenance
Moves a firm into a new financial year: carries account opening balances and opening stock forward into a new database, and clears the old database's day-to-day transaction history. This is the other half of Multi-Year Database Linking — that setting tells dsGST which database is the "previous" one; Period Close is what actually populates the new one from it.
The screen itself displays this warning, in bold: "Please take backup and proceed with care. Entries Deleted / Changed Here Cannot Be Recovered." Every step below is either a bulk delete or a bulk recalculation run directly against live tables — there is no undo inside dsGST itself. Take a full database backup before starting.
Start New Period
Nothing on this screen is usable until Allow Closing is ticked — it exists specifically so the screen can't be acted on by accident. Once ticked, work through the three numbered steps in order:
1. Prepare New
Opens a dialog to create (or point to) the new database that the upcoming financial year will run in. This is what populates the Prev Db field back on the main screen — the database Steps 2 and 3 read from and write against.
2. Delete Entries
Removes the old database's transaction history up to the closing date you've set, so the new period starts clean. Tick only the categories you actually want cleared — each is independent:
- Delete Transactions — every sale/purchase/return/adjustment/ voucher/cheque dated before the closing date, plus their linked e-invoice (IRN/e-way bill) records, purchase orders, sale orders, quotations, rate contracts, and liaison claim bills.
- Carry UnAdj Exp In / Out — before the delete runs, any not-yet-adjusted Expiry Inward/Outward entries are carried forward into the new period instead of being discarded with the rest.
- Delete Action, Delete Short Item, Delete Schm Reg, Delete Bank Stmt, Delete 2A (JsON), Delete Print Count, Delete Login, Delete SMS, Delete Memo, Delete App Recp, Delete App Order, Transfer GODOWN Stock — historical scheme/log/import/app-collection housekeeping, each scoped to its own table. Leave unchecked anything you want to keep.
3. Set Opening Values
Calculates the new period's starting position from the old database:
- Ac Opg Balance — closing balance of every account in the old database becomes the opening balance of the same account in the new one.
- Carry Stocks — closing stock (quantity, batch, last rate/MRP/expiry) for every item becomes an Opening Stock entry in the new database. Use Non Zero / +ve Stk / All to control which items get carried when stock is zero or negative, and Skip Service/Skip Expired to leave out non-stock items or already-expired batches.
Large item lists are processed in batches automatically — expect this step to take a while on a big item master.
Delete Masters
A separate cleanup utility on the same screen, not part of the numbered sequence above — permanently deletes Account Heads, Items, or Manufacturers outright. Independent of closing a period; only use this if you specifically intend to remove master records, not as a routine part of starting a new year.
Reset Opening Stock
A narrower, single-purpose tool for when the current database's own Opening Stock is wrong and needs recomputing — it does not create or switch to a new database. Delete Opg Stk removes existing Opening Stock entries up to the date you set, and Carry Stocks (same Non-Zero/+ve/All and Skip Service/Skip Expired options as above) recomputes them from the transaction history already in this database. Same backup warning applies.
Related Maintenance (not yet documented here)
The Period Close Maintenance menu also has: Recalculate Opening Value, Delete Old Adjustment/Expiry, Delete After, Get Previous Year Cheque, and Close Entries. These aren't covered in this article yet — flagged as a follow-up rather than guessed at.