Handle December and January receipts without year-end confusion

Year-end creates three dates that can look interchangeable: when the purchase happened, when payment cleared, and when the receipt was uploaded. They are not the same field. A useful document collection keeps the purchase evidence clear and lets the accountant decide the accounting implications.

Just Invoice retrieves receipts by the purchase date the customer enters. Its previous-year shortcut is convenient only when that metadata is correct. Take extra care with paper found after the holidays, delayed supplier emails, and old receipts uploaded during a January cleanup.

Work through the boundary examples

These are organization examples, not rulings about deductible periods or tax return treatment. The document date, delivery, service period, payment, and other facts may matter to the professional review. If the source has more than one relevant date, explain what it shows.

Do not infer the date from your bank statement

A card transaction may post later than the purchase. A transfer may settle in a different month. Use the statement to cross-check completeness, but do not automatically replace a supplier date with the posting date just to make the library match the statement.

For example, a store receipt dated December 31 may appear in the card account on January 2. The receipt-year field should reflect the purchase evidence. Send the payment context to the accountant through your normal process when it affects the review.

Check the previous-year package

Browse December of the previous year and January of the new year. Look for purchases you recognize near the boundary, then inspect their source dates. If you find a December receipt in January because the default was accepted, correct it in the customer account and recreate the relevant annual ZIP.

Check that uploads are complete and that the exported index includes the expected documents. An upload started but not finished is not a ready source file in the package. A high receipt count does not prove that every boundary transaction is accounted for.

Explain uncertainty rather than hiding it

If a supplier order became an invoice later, preserve the source PDF and explain the sequence. Do not overwrite printed dates, combine unrelated transactions, or guess a fiscal period to make the year-end collection look tidy. A clear unresolved question gives the accountant something concrete to examine.

Use the purchase-year guide for library behavior and the invoice-date versus payment-date guide for the separate sales-report basis.