We are looking at changing our fiscal year. The current fiscal year ends at the end of June. For financial reporting, we are going to have our normal cutoff at the end of this June, another cutoff at the end of July, and then start the new fiscal year to run Aug – Jul. The 12 months ending in June and the one-month period will be audited at the same time and both periods will be included in this year’s audited statement.
We don’t know if we should set up 13-month campaigns and appeals ending in July or end the campaigns and appeals in June as normal and create one-month campaigns and appeals.
Does anyone have any words of advice for handling campaigns, appeals, batches, seasons, etc. for a fiscal year change? Thanks!
There might be other considerations I'm not thinking of, but if you are going to have a 13 month audit period, I'd be inclined to make the campaigns 13 months as well. Seems like it would be cleaner for reporting purposes.
One possible drawback to having one set of 13-month campaigns is that if you're doing year over year revenue analysis, and you have one oddball 13-month year in the mix, it might give you deceptive results.
I think it depends largely on what your reporting needs are.
Thank you both for your thoughts. I was also concerned about reporting implications with a 13-month year particularly for comparison reports for devo. I talked it through with Nick Barnett from Tessitura consulting. We decided the reporting effects would be minimal so we are going forward with a 13-month year for campaigns, etc. It turns out the batch dates for batch period 12 will have to run for 2 months, which should have limited effect for us.