Closing the year, reopening it, and closing it againإقفال السنة وإعادة فتحها ثم إقفالها من جديد

A year was closed, and then a sales invoice from December turns up. This guide follows that case from start to finish on a live company: a year of sales, purchases and two vouchers, closed, then reopened, corrected and closed again. Every figure below was read back from the books after each step.

The short version: closing never deletes the old year. It writes closing vouchers on the last day of the year and one opening voucher on the first day of the next, then moves the company into the new year. Reverse closing takes those vouchers away again and moves the company back.

1. What a closing does

The worked example is a company whose 2025 holds three sales invoices, two purchase invoices, one rent voucher and one small income voucher: a profit of USD 1,510. When the year was closed, Libra:

• moved every income and expense account to zero with closing vouchers dated 31-12-2025, and carried the result into account 138, Result of the period - Profit (a loss would go to 139);
• wrote one opening voucher dated 01-01-2026 carrying what is still open into the new year: the customer, the supplier, the cash and the profit;
• switched the company to 2026;
• kept a read-only copy of 2025 so its reports can still be printed.

Every 2025 invoice is still in the books, untouched.

2. Before you close

• Enter everything that belongs to the year. Once it is closed, documents dated in it are refused (section 4).
• Take a backup and get every user out of the company.
• Enter the change in stock value. Ticking Income statement on the closing screen reminds you of exactly that:

3. Close the year

Open the End of year closing group in the menu and click End of year closing.

The screen names the year it will close, Closing of Year 2025, and starts with only the first two steps available.

Tick the boxes from the top down; each one makes the next available. If the company has no fixed assets, tick Manual beside Fixed asset depreciation. Close expenses and revenues is the step that does the closing, and Transfer ending balances is the one that opens the new year.

Press Issue. Because Closing accounts setup is ticked, Libra first shows which accounts each step closes into. Choose a step in Closing step to see its accounts. A row marked in the Correct column has to be fixed before you go on. Here, Closing incomes and expenses ends in 138 and 139:

Press Ok. Ok starts the closing at once, so be sure before you press it. The balance sheet opens in its own windows (four of them here); close them when you have read them. The run ends with:

4. What a closed year looks like

After the next login the status bar shows the new year, and the lock date has moved to its first day:

A document can no longer be dated in 2025. On a new sales invoice, a December 2025 date is refused - the date box turns red and will not take it:

To enter or change something in 2025 you have two choices. For a small amount, an adjusting entry dated in 2026 is usually the better answer - nothing has to be undone. To change 2025 itself, reverse the closing (section 5).

5. Reopen the year: Reverse closing of current year

Back up again and get everyone out, then click Reverse closing of current year in the same group.

The first closing your company has ever done is a special case. The screen looks for the opening voucher of the year before the one you closed, and a company's first year has none. So even right after a real closing, every option is greyed and this question appears:

On a company that has never been closed, No is the only right answer. Yes would move it back a year and delete its opening vouchers. On a company whose first closing you have just run, Yes is the way through, and it asks for a password:

This is a support password, not your login. Ask your Libra support provider to do this step with you; do not guess it. Once it is accepted, the screen names the year it will reopen. The options stay greyed because, on a first closing, the whole closing is undone in one go:

Press Ok. It ends with:

The closing vouchers of 31-12-2025 and the opening voucher of 01-01-2026 are gone, and the company is back in 2025. Nothing else was removed: all seven 2025 documents were still there.

If your company has closed earlier years as well, the options are available instead of greyed. On that screen a ticked box means undo: tick Transfer balances to reopen the year, and Income/Expense closing as well to remove the closing vouchers - the usual pair, since closing again rebuilds both.

6. Repost straight away

At the next login Libra opens the Repost screen on its own, and the status bar asks for it:

Press Repost. Balances shown on reports are not reliable until you do. After the repost in the example, every account matched its figure from before the closing, to the cent.

7. Correct, then close again

Now the year is open, so the late invoice can be entered with its real date:

Then run End of year closing again, exactly as in section 3. The new opening voucher is built from the corrected books: in the example the profit carried into 2026 went from 1,510 to 1,830, and the customer's opening balance from 2,810 to 3,130 - both up by the invoice's 320.

The voucher numbers carry on from the first closing. The second run's closing vouchers were numbered from 16 to 30 and its opening voucher 2, not 1. That is expected, not an error.

8. A year that is not the last one closed

Reverse closing only ever undoes the latest closing. To reach an older year, reverse the newest year first, repost, then reverse the next one - one year at a time - make the correction, and close the years again from the oldest forward. That is a lot of work for one invoice, which is why an adjusting entry in the current year is usually the better answer.