Company profile, account numbers, and period lock

Every company carries a profile: its legal identity, its address, and the financial settings that shape its books and reports. Open Settings to manage that profile, tidy account numbers after an import, and lock periods you have finished. Creating the company itself and managing its owners are covered in Create a company and add owners; this article is about the profile fields, the account-number cleanup, and Period Lock.

General Settings

The Settings page reads top to bottom as a set of sections. Organization holds the company Name. Below it, Legal records the company's legal identity: Country, Entity type, EIN / Tax ID, State registration number, and Industry. Choosing a country first is what populates the entity-type list for that country, so set the country before the entity type.

The Address section holds the company's registered street, city, state, ZIP code, and country. Keep it accurate, because report headers and other documents draw on it.

These fields describe the company but do not move money. Enter what you know, leave the rest blank, and select Save changes when you are done. Blank fields are saved as empty rather than guessed.

Financials And The Fiscal Year

The Financials section controls the books' money settings. Default currency is fixed at USD; LedgerHQ keeps U.S.-dollar books. The setting that matters most here is Fiscal year start.

Fiscal year start is the month a company's financial year begins. It drives report periods: a company that starts its year in January produces calendar-year reports, while one that starts in July produces a fiscal year that runs July through June. Set it to match how the company actually reports. Getting it wrong shifts every year-to-date and annual figure, so confirm it before you rely on reports.

Clean Up Imported Account Numbers

When a chart of accounts arrives from an import, its account numbers often carry import prefixes or an inconsistent numbering scheme. The Account numbers section normalizes them. It previews a full set of proposed numbers before it changes anything, so you can review the whole plan first.

Select Preview cleanup to load the current chart and build a proposal. You choose one of two modes:

• Remove QBO prefix only keeps the imported numbering order and strips just the import label, the lightest possible touch.
• Renumber by account type moves the whole chart into separate ranges for assets, liabilities, equity, revenue, and expenses, leaving room between accounts for future additions. You set each type's starting number and the step between accounts.

The preview table shows each account's current number, its proposed number, and a status. You can edit any proposed number inline. Rows flagged as blank or duplicate must be fixed before you can save — LedgerHQ will not let a cleanup create a missing or repeated account number. When the plan is clean, select Save numbers to apply it. Nothing changes until you save, and you can Rebuild preview as many times as you like first.

Lock Closed Periods

Once a period is reconciled and reported, you do not want anyone — a person or an automation — quietly changing a transaction dated inside it. Period Lock protects a finished period by refusing new or edited transactions on or before a chosen date. That is the reason to lock: a locked period keeps the numbers you already reported from silently drifting.

LedgerHQ suggests a lock date when it is safe to do so. When every reconciliation-tracked account is complete through a date, the section shows a Suggested lock date with a one-click Use date button. This is the "why" made concrete — the suggestion means the books are settled through that point.

To lock, set the Lock date and select Set Lock. From then on, no transaction can be created or modified on or before that date. To move the lock later — for example, after closing the next month — set a new, later date and lock again. Prefer the suggested date when one is offered, because it reflects completed reconciliations rather than a guess.