How to close job costing and the accounting period in Epicor

Run a clean job costing and period close

1. 1Confirm all labor entries for the period are posted - check for unposted time via the labor entry/employee time tracker and post any outstanding entries.
2. 2Run Capture Costs (Production Management > Job Management > General Operations > Capture Costs, or confirm your environment runs it automatically) to roll transactional labor, material, and subcontract costs into job cost records.
3. 3Review the WIP Detail / WIP Reconciliation report for jobs with unexpected balances - large unexplained WIP often indicates missing receipts, unposted labor, or a job that should have been closed earlier.
4. 4For jobs that are complete, run Job Closing (or the engineered Complete/Close job action) so their final costs relieve WIP into inventory/COGS and the job stops accepting new transactions.
5. 5Reconcile the WIP account balance in the GL against the sum of open job WIP values - a mismatch usually means a transaction posted outside the normal job cost flow (a manual GL entry) or a timing gap between subledger and GL posting.
6. 6Review and post any manufacturing variances (purchase price variance, labor efficiency, burden absorption) that your costing method generates.
7. 7Run standard month-end financial closing steps (AP/AR sub-ledger close, bank rec) before touching the GL calendar.
8. 8Close the accounting period in GL Period Maintenance / Fiscal Calendar only after confirming no more job transactions need to post into it - once closed, transactions dated in that period are blocked (or routed to the next open period depending on configuration).

Diagnosing WIP variances

-- Jobs with open (non-closed) status and nonzero WIP as of period end
SELECT JobNum, PartNum, JobComplete, JobClosed
FROM JobHead
WHERE Company = 'EPIC06' AND JobClosed = 0 AND JobComplete = 1;

Common pitfalls

• !Closing the GL period before Capture Costs has run for the last day(s) of the period, leaving job costs stranded in the wrong period once GL close blocks posting.
• !Treating every nonzero WIP balance as an error - open (in-process) jobs are supposed to carry WIP; the review should target jobs that are complete but still show WIP, or balances that grew unexpectedly.
• !Forgetting that job closing is often irreversible or requires an explicit reopen process - closing a job prematurely before a late material receipt posts can misstate that job's final cost.
• !Ignoring standard cost variance postings, letting a real efficiency or price variance accumulate unnoticed because nobody reviewed the variance account during close.
• !Running mass job close without a WIP reconciliation review first, closing jobs that actually needed investigation.
• !Manual GL journal entries posted directly against the WIP account outside the job cost flow, breaking subledger-to-GL reconciliation for future periods.