It is my understanding the fiscal years for Canada and New York State (and Japan?) begin April 1, 1999 and that the U.S. fiscal year begins October 1, 1999. Although I have read hundreds of articles regarding 1/1/2000 problems, the fiscal year issue is never mentioned.

What types of problems are likely to be encountered during fiscal year turnovers and could such problems be significant.

Thank you.

-- Doug Walter (walter@magick.net), February 26, 1999

Answers

Primarily, the problems will be with internal accounting and budgetting systems.

A much better question to have asked is:"What types of problems will be evident to the outside observer?"

To this, the answer is "Not many, if any at all."

Noone is going to stand up in a press conference and say that the budget process or the accounting process for payroll is locked up. They will find a way to pay the people and budget it later. They will find a way to manually write the checks for the suppliers and budget/account for them later, purely so the outsiders do NOT find out.

Just my NTBHO.

Chuck, who once worked for a county and read the papers at the same time. No correspondence between reported reality and experienced reality.

-- Chuck, night driver (rienzoo@en.com), February 26, 1999.

Doug,

Here's a link to a recent thread that answers some of your questions:

http://www.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=000W5L

-- Kevin (mixesmusic@worldnet.att.net), February 26, 1999.

its probably the most important question asked on this forum...and we need better responses than the shlock we've had so far. So Grey bear, where are you, and where are the geniuses who can tell us what is going to happen. Isn't fiscal year rollover going to gum up the governments ability to operate? Cmon people, lets hear about it.

-- good question (hm@hm.com), February 26, 1999.

hm: This forum has covered it in great detail. Please check the older threads...starting about two years ago...

There's enough to keep you reading and thinking for about 2 solid days.

-- PNG (png@gol.com), February 26, 1999.

When businesses, government entities, and other organizations roll over to a new fiscal year, they typically advance the fiscal calendars in their databases to the end of the new fiscal year. That is, they have 12 monthly buckets for the new year. In the case of an organization whose new fiscal year begins on April Fools Day 1999, month 1 would be for fiscal April, month 2 for May, etc. up to month 12 for fiscal March 2000.

One way that an organization can temporarily "trick" its systems to prevent a Y2K failure is to shorten the fiscal year so that it ends before 2000-01-01. How this could be done in our example is for the first week in December to be considered fiscal December, the second week to be fiscal January 2000, the third to be fiscal February, and the fourth to be Fiscal March. This would give the organization additional time to correct its Y2K problems.

The biggest problem with this trickery is that a forecasting or procdurement system may need to plan for events that actually happen in 2000. This trick is basically robbing Peter to pay Paul.

-- Incredulous (ytt000@aol.com), February 26, 1999.

The csy2-k faq has a page about fiscal 2000 problems:

http://www.computerpro.com/~phystad/jae.html

In addition, I have found a software company web page that warns of fiscal 2000 issues. Look here:

http://www.accpac.com/products/simply/notice9901.htm

Companies don't always open up a new fiscal year right away. They often wait until all of the year-end entries are posted before they "roll over" to the new year. This could take 3 or 4 weeks. And accounting system problems aren't the type of thing that is immediately obvious to outsiders. I would imagine that most corporations could muddle along quite nicely for several months with a non-functional general ledger.

Hope this helps.

Jo Anne

-- Jo Anne Slaven (slaven@rogerswave.ca), February 27, 1999.