We have quite a few appeals, tied to source codes/pricing rules and ongoing discounts.
Some will naturally end at the year's end, but some of our discounts will persist through 2018. I'm looking for the most efficient, and long-term solution to ending a fiscal year in this respect; if necessary, re-creating the appeals/source codes wouldn't be terrible, but it would take a good chunk of time.
Thoughts? When 2017 ends and 2018 starts, would we have to inactivate, then re-create those appeals? Or could we just go into each appeal and adjust the target campaign, and end date?
Definitely check with Marketing and Finance too. We have around 30 corporate discounts that I rebuild every year so that the revenue and purchases point to the correct fiscal year. We do a lot of year over year reporting and having everything in one appeal wouldn't allow for a clear picture.
I'm going to echo comments above and say that understanding your reporting needs, particularly financial, are the first step. It's not uncommon for a contribution entered today to need to be filed under a campaign for the previous fiscal year (or a future fiscal year), but it's rarer for that to happen with a ticketing transaction. We do some ticket sales in advance of the actual season (and fiscal year), and in that case we do apply the sales to a source/appeal/campaign for the upcoming fiscal year, but a reason backdating a source is hard for me to imagine.
Creating all the "fiscal year data structures", as I call them (Seasons, Campaigns, Appeals, Sources, GL codes, Batch Periods) is a potentially time consuming operation, especially as we have 10 seasons every fiscal year, 14+ campaigns and under each numerous appeals and hundreds of sources.
Since we have, at this point, a fairly well defined structure, I have built a utility in SQL that allows me to build out all of these structures (and a fair number that are custom to us) by copying over the data from the prior season (skipping any reported sums) and shifting the dates and the date-format part of our naming conventions.
Lastly, on the point of inactivating: sources will becoming unavailable based on the date ranges that you have assigned to them, or date ranges inherited from their appeals (if they lack date ranges of their own). Inactivating/closing seasons, campaigns, appeals, etc. is not necessarily something you want to do immediately at fiscal year end. The main affect of inactivating appeals and campaigns is to shuffle them to the bottom of selections lists for list criteria and the like. So we typically keep three seasons "active" at all times: typically CFY, CFY -1 and CFY -2, but as soon as the new fiscal year's data structures are created it becomes CFY +1, CFY, CFY -1.