Define Your Fiscal Year
Specify a fiscal year that fits your business needs.
Required Editions
| Available in: both Salesforce Classic and Lightning Experience |
| Available in: All Editions except for Database.com. |
| User Permissions Needed | |
|---|---|
| To define or edit fiscal years: | Customize Application |
If your fiscal year follows the Gregorian calendar, but does not start in January, you can define a standard fiscal year with a different starting month. If your fiscal year follows a different structure from the Gregorian calendar, you can define a custom fiscal year that meets your needs.
Whether you use a standard fiscal year or a custom fiscal year, you define individual fiscal years one time. These fiscal year definitions allow you to use these fiscal periods throughout Salesforce including in reporting, opportunities, and forecasting.
Standard Fiscal Years
Standard fiscal years follow the Gregorian calendar, but can start on the first day of any month of the year.
Custom Fiscal Years
Some companies break down their fiscal years, quarters, and weeks into custom fiscal periods based on their financial planning requirements. Salesforce allows you to flexibly define these periods using custom fiscal years. For example, you can create a 13-week quarter represented by three periods of four, four, and five weeks, rather than calendar months.
If you use a common fiscal year structure, such as 4-4-5 or a 13-period structure, you can rapidly define a fiscal year. Just specify a start date and choose an included template. If the fiscal year structure you need is not among the templates, you can easily modify a template to suit your business. For example, if you use three fiscal quarters per year (a trimester) rather than four, delete or modify quarters and periods to meet your needs.
Your custom fiscal periods can be named based on your standards. For example, a fiscal period could be called “P2” or “February.”
Fiscal years can be modified any time. For example, you can add an extra week to synchronize a custom fiscal year with a standard calendar in a leap year. Changes to fiscal year structure take effect immediately upon being saved. If you use forecasting, Salesforce recalculates your forecasts when you save changes to a fiscal year.
Considerations for Enabling Custom Fiscal Years
Before enabling custom fiscal years, consider these key points.
- After you enable custom fiscal years, you can’t disable the feature. However, to revert to standard fiscal years, you can define custom fiscal years that follow the same Gregorian calendar structure as the Salesforce standard fiscal years.
- Fiscal year definitions are not automatically created. Define a custom fiscal year for each year you do business.
- Enabling or defining custom fiscal years impacts your
forecasts, reports, and quotas.
- When you define the first custom fiscal year, all existing forecasts, forecast history, and forecast adjustments from the year’s first period forward are deleted. Forecasts for periods before the first custom fiscal year are not deleted and can be accessed as usual.
- When you define a new custom fiscal year, any existing forecasts, forecast history, forecast adjustments, and quotas for the corresponding standard fiscal year are lost.
- You can’t use fiscal period columns in opportunity, opportunity with product, or opportunity with schedule reports.
- Opportunity list views don’t include a fiscal period column.
- When custom fiscal years are enabled, you can't use the FISCAL_MONTH(), FISCAL_QUARTER(), or FISCAL_YEAR() date functions in SOQL.
- Set the Fiscal Year
If your company follows the Gregorian calendar year but you want to change the fiscal year start month, use standard fiscal years. If your company does not observe a standard fiscal year, you can enable custom fiscal years, which define a more complex fiscal year structure. - Customize the Fiscal Year Structure
If your custom fiscal year needs a different structure than one available from the templates, modify the details of your custom fiscal year definition. - Customize the Fiscal Year Labels
Customize the labels of your fiscal years in two ways: Naming schemes and prefix choices or fiscal year picklist customization. - Choose a Custom Fiscal Year Template
When defining a new custom fiscal year, your first step is to choose a custom fiscal year template. - Define or Modify a Custom Fiscal Year
Set up your company’s custom fiscal years to fit your company’s calendar. If you define a custom fiscal year and want to change it, edit the existing fiscal year definition.
