What is a Fiscal Year?
The fiscal year is the financial year of a company that tracks how the company performed during the specified period. Many companies and countries start their fiscal year in January and end them in December. However, there are some companies or countries where it’s different. For example, in India, the financial year starts in April and ends in March. However, it’s important to note that the fiscal year still contains 12 months in these instances.
2 types of Fiscal years:
- Standard Fiscal Year: You can use it if your organization follows the Gregorian Calendar for the financial year and the number of months in the whole year remains 12 and each quarter is 4 months. For the Standard Fiscal Year in Salesforce, you are able to change the start month, and specify whether the fiscal year name is set to the starting or ending month.
- Custom Fiscal Year: You can use it if your organization does not follow the Gregorian Calendar for the financial year and the year needs to be customized, such as when there are considered 13 periods a year or 4 quarters with 13 weeks per quarter in a 4-4-5 pattern.
Considerations
Before enabling a Custom Fiscal Year in Salesforce, there are a couple of things that we should keep in mind:
- Once you enable custom fiscal years, salesforce.com will no longer automatically define your organization’s fiscal year. The only fiscal years available for reports, quotas, forecasts, and so on will be those defined by your organization.
- Enabling custom fiscal years is not reversible. Once you enable it, you cannot revert to standard fiscal years. However, you can define your custom fiscal years to match a standard fiscal year.
- If you have forecasting features enabled, creating the initial custom fiscal year deletes all quotas and adjustments from that year forward.
Additional Resources:
- Salesforce Help: Define Your Fiscal Year
