Frozen figures, staleness and drift
Closing a month does two separate things: it stops new entries landing in the month, and it takes a permanent copy of the month's numbers. This page is about the second one — what gets frozen, when a frozen copy stops being the current answer, and what it means if the live figures wander away from it.
What closing freezes
When a month closes, all nine reports in the Report pack are saved as they stood at that moment:
Income Statement · Balance Sheet · Trial Balance · Inventory Valuation · COGS · GINR Balance · Reconciliation Summary · Trial Balance Reconciliation · Sync Category Reconciliation
Those saved copies are the month's numbers of record. Six months later, when someone asks what June's Balance Sheet said, you open June and read the same figures you signed off — not a fresh calculation that happens to be running today.
The header of the Report pack tells you which kind of figures you are looking at:
| Panel heading | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Preliminary — period open | The month isn't closed. Everything here is calculated live and can still change. |
| As at close — <date> | The month is closed. You're reading the saved copies. |
Open any report and the same distinction appears as chips on the dialog: a
green Snapshot chip or a blue Live one, plus Preliminary where the
figures aren't authoritative. Underneath, a line records exactly when the
figures you're reading came into being: Snapshotted and a date and time for
a saved copy, Computed and a date and time for one worked out on the spot —
Computed 09/12/2026, 19:01:35. That line is how you tell which reports are
saved and when each was taken.
The exported workbook carries the same labels: each report sheet opens with the report's name against As at close or Live, then a Generated at row. On an open month, the PRELIMINARY row — Period is not closed — figures may still change. — appears both on the cover sheet and again on every report sheet, so a sheet that gets pulled out on its own still says what it is. See Export the close pack.
What makes a frozen copy stale
Reopening a month does not throw its saved figures away — they're kept for the audit trail — but they stop being the current answer. The reopen dialog says so before you commit: Reopening removes this period's lock so entries can post into it again. The close snapshots are kept but flagged stale.
After a reopen, every report card in the pack is chipped Superseded, and hovering it explains: The figures saved at the last close no longer apply — this month was reopened. Opening this shows live figures instead. Close the month again to save a new set.
The month's own notice repeats it: <Month> was reopened, chipped Unlocked, with The previous close snapshots are kept but marked stale — closing again takes a fresh set as the month's numbers of record.
Closing the month again writes a completely fresh set. The acknowledgements from the previous close are cleared too, so anything you waived last time has to be waived again — a warning may well have been fixed in between.
A frozen copy is only served while the month is Closed
This is the rule that stops a reopened month quietly showing you last month's answer:
- Closed — opening a report shows the saved copy, chipped Snapshot, and the exported workbook does the same.
- In Review after a reopen — opening a report shows live figures, chipped Live and Preliminary, even though a saved copy still exists behind the scenes. The export is live and preliminary too.
So a reopened month always tells you the truth about right now, and the saved copy waits, marked Superseded, until the month is closed again.
The pack has a second, rarer chip for the same underlying condition. Stale is what a saved copy flagged this way is called while the month is closed — so the card is offering you a frozen copy you can open, but one that predates a reopen. Its hover text says as much: This snapshot predates a reopen — numbers may have moved since. Re-close the period to refresh it. Superseded and Stale never appear at the same time; which one you get depends only on whether the month is closed right now.
Very occasionally a closed month has no saved copy for one of the nine reports. That report opens with a red Snapshot missing chip and the explanation: This closed period has no saved snapshot for this report — the figures below are a live recompute, not the authoritative close numbers. This indicates an integrity gap; re-verify the period. Run Verify and, if it persists, reopen and re-close the month so a complete set is taken.
A report that could not be produced at close time is recorded rather than silently left out: This report could not be produced for the period, so it holds no figures and was not verified.
Why a closed month's numbers can still drift
Verify on a closed month recalculates all nine reports right now and compares each against its saved copy, figure by figure. There is deliberately no tolerance: a one-cent movement in a month you signed off is a real change to a number of record, not noise.
A clean result reads:
No drift — every authoritative report that could be compared still matches its close snapshot. Informational reports may change as reconciliation continues.
A dirty one reads:
Drift detected — one or more reports no longer match their close snapshot (informational changes, e.g. reconciliation, are excluded).
Each report then carries its own verdict, one of five: matches, drifted, changed (informational), could not be produced for a report the pack never managed to build, and snapshot missing for one with no saved copy at all.
Wherever figures actually moved — drifted or changed (informational) — the report shows exactly which ones, in a small table with Figure, At close and Live now columns. So a June Balance Sheet whose Total Assets went from 28,558.58 to 30,058.58 tells you the amount, not merely that something happened. The other three verdicts show no table: nothing moved, or there were no numbers to move.
Why "informational" doesn't count
Three of the nine reports are reconciliation reports — Reconciliation Summary, Trial Balance Reconciliation and Sync Category Reconciliation. They are expected to move after a close, because reconciliation work carries on: entries finish syncing to your provider, a category gets settled, a variance is cleared. When those change, Verify reports changed (informational) and the month's overall verdict stays clean. Only the six authoritative reports can raise drift by having their figures move.
There is one thing an informational report can still spoil, and it isn't drift: if any of the nine has no saved copy at all, the overall verdict goes amber whichever kind of report it is, because a clean "no drift" would be claiming more than the comparison established. A report that could not be produced is counted the same way — the summary gains a sentence saying how many reports could not be produced and were therefore not verified.
What drift actually means
Here's the important part: normal work cannot make a closed month drift. The lock sees to that. A late June bill, an edit to a June order, a correction — all of them are booked on the first open day after the lock, never inside the closed month. That is explained in What closing does to your books.
So if Verify reports drift, it almost always means something reached the ledger outside that path. In practice that is one of:
- a support repair applied to your data at your request;
- a data fix run to correct an earlier problem;
- a change made directly to your records outside the app's screens.
None of those are things you do by accident during a normal month.
Three things follow:
- The saved figures are still the numbers of record. They are what you signed off and what you gave your accountant. Drift means the live figures moved away from them — not that the saved ones became wrong.
- Verify is a report, not a repair. It only reads and compares, so running it is always safe and you can run it as often as you like. It never changes anything.
- Re-closing is how you resync reality. If the change was legitimate and should stand, reopen the month, record why, and close it again. That takes a fresh set of figures that matches what the books now say. If the change was not legitimate, you now have the evidence — the exact figures, before and after — to get it investigated.
See Verify a closed month for how to run it and read the result.
The rare case of a posting landing mid-close
There is one narrow way a closed month's figures can be incomplete without anybody doing anything unusual.
Freezing the reports and adding the lock happen inside one piece of work that either lands whole or not at all, so you never end up with a lock and no saved figures, or saved figures and no lock. What that does not prevent is an entry that was already under way when the close began: posting is what consults the lock, and such an entry can, very occasionally, commit in the last instants before the lock takes hold. When that happens, the frozen figures may not include it, even though the entry is legitimately in the month.
This is a known and accepted limit, not a fault to report, and it is exactly what Verify was designed to catch: the entry is in the live books, so the recalculated figures include it, the saved copies don't, and Verify reports the difference the next time you run it. The fix is the ordinary one — reopen, record why, close again.
Two practical habits make it a non-event:
- Run Verify once shortly after a close, while the month is fresh in your mind. A difference found the same week is far easier to explain than one found in an audit.
- Close on a quiet moment, not while a large sync or generation run is still working through the month. The Entries synced and Ledger generation checks on the checklist are telling you about exactly that; see Batches and the close.
Next steps
- Verify a closed month — run the comparison and read the result.
- Read the month's reports — open the nine reports and tell preliminary figures from the numbers of record.
- Reopen a closed month — what a reopen does to the saved figures.
- What closing does to your books — the lock that keeps normal work out of a closed month.
- Read your financial statements — the Income Statement and Balance Sheet outside the close.