What is Fiscal Year Freezing?
Fiscal Year Freezing lets you "lock" one or more completed fiscal years so that all reports for those periods are permanently preserved, so that you will never accidentally modify already declared data, thus creating a very painful accounting issue.
How does freezing work?
You can freeze up to any completed fiscal year. The current, ongoing year cannot be frozen yet. Freezing a year automatically includes all prior years too: if you freeze FY2023, then FY2023 and every earlier year become frozen at the same time.
Once frozen, those years are protected:
transactions in frozen years cannot be created, edited, or deleted
new data imports (CSV files, new exchange connections) cannot affect frozen years without your explicit decision
reports for frozen years will always regenerate with identical figures
What prevents me from freezing?
Freezing is blocked if any year within the range you want to freeze has unresolved Negative Balance, Missing Price, or Unlinked Transfer errors. These need to be resolved first to ensure the frozen snapshot is accurate.
Mismatch errors do not block freezing.
What happens when I need to change something in a frozen year?
If you ever need to edit, delete, or add a transaction in a frozen year, for example because you discovered a missing import, you can unfreeze those years. Unfreezing requires explicit confirmation and automatically triggers a recomputation of your accounting from that year forward.
⚠️ Keep in mind: unfreezing means your past reports may no longer match what you originally filed. Finbooks will always show you clearly which years will be affected before you confirm.
⚠️ Important: Depending on your country, changes to previously filed periods may have tax implications. Finbooks will remind you of this at every unfreeze step, but we recommend consulting a tax professional if you're unsure.
What about new data I add after freezing?
The way new data interacts with your frozen years depends on how it arrives:
New CSV file upload
If the file contains transactions dated within your frozen range, Finbooks will pause and ask you to decide, for each affected fiscal year, whether to ignore those transactions or unfreeze and import them.
New exchange/wallet connection
If historical transactions are found in frozen years, you'll be asked to choose a policy before the connection is fully set up: either ignore all frozen-range history from this connection, or import it and unfreeze the affected years.
What about regulatory or calculation updates?
Occasionally, Finbooks updates its calculation engine to reflect changes in tax regulations or interpretations of existing rules.
When this happens, you'll be asked to choose a cutoff point: keep the previous calculation method up to a certain fiscal year, and apply the new rules from the next year onward. If your choice involves unfreezing previously locked years, you'll be guided through the process with full clarity on what changes.
How do I know when to freeze?
Finbooks will proactively remind you to freeze at the right moments, for example right after you download reports for a completed fiscal year, or during filing season. You can also freeze at any time from the fiscal year management screen.
As a general rule: freeze as soon as you've filed, so your reports are locked to exactly what you submitted.
Frozen years and report downloads
Reports for frozen fiscal years can always be downloaded, even if there are unresolved errors in other, more recent years.
Frozen years are by definition error-free, and their reports will never show warnings or inconsistency notices.
Can I re-freeze after unfreezing?
Yes. After unfreezing, making your changes, and reviewing the updated results, you can freeze again manually. Finbooks will encourage you to do so.