Hi John:

Sage will not allow you to post in January 2019 because you haven't changed your session date to the new calendar year. Once this date is changed it will prompt you to confirm the new calendar year.

Hope this helps!

What exactly is a session date?

A session date is the date you tell the program that you wish to use as the default date.  Usually that date is Today, whatever today is.

From the Maintenance menu you can change it.

The date is used to tell the program what date is today and the program will respond with date-sensitive warnings for you.  The warnings will tell you if you are posting in previous months or in the future, either of which may be wrong if you typed the wrong date by accident.

The program controls two types of years, Fiscal (income tax) and Calendar (payroll).  Sometimes Dec 31 is the year end date for both, but corporate fiscal end dates can be any date (eg. Halloween).  Rolling forward to a new calendar year before you are ready prevents you from posting payroll with Automatic Payroll Calculations into the previous year.

You roll forward to a new year based on the session date.  Change the date to any date in Jan and you will be able to post to January.

BTW, if you have never seen the Change Session Date dialog when you start the program, you can turn it on by selecting Setup, User Preferences, View, Show Change Session Date at Startup.

Many people who create a file with the wizard will have the fiscal start date as the session date for the entire year and not know why the program is always telling them they are posting to the future when most of the dates are really in the past.  If your session date stays on Nov 1/18 all the time, you will get those messages.

Thanks Richard. Another question. The year end correcting entries, will these amounts be propagated to the new fiscal year?

Yes.  Just post them to the last day of the applicable fiscal year and they will carry over to the appropriate accounts in the new year when you run reports on it.