Changing fiscal year due to Acquisition

[SujithKumar]

We have been acquired last week and we need to change our fiscal Year/periods (Acquisition is not closed yet, its expected to happen in August 2012 after regulatory and share holder approvals).
Our current year ends by June 2012, so we have very little time to understand, what need to be done, test it out and implement for the new year. So its a high priority task

This is the situation.

LeCroy fiscal year runs from July to June (so right now we are in FY 2012/12).
Acquired company have fiscal year running from Jan to Dec.
Also we have PM10 (infor consolidation software) to worry about as well
1) So our current FY2012 is 07/03/2011 to 06/30/2012.
2)With the acquisition we have an interim period between 07/01/2012 and Deal close date, estimated to be around 08/15/12.
3) AFter the deal closes, we will have to switch new companies calender, ie from 08/16/12 till 12/31/2012
4) From 01/01/2013 a new fiscal year starts and everything back to normal

We need to understand how to handle 2 & 3. How does companies handle these situation? What is your advice?
- We are thinking of creating two separate interim fiscal years for those time frame (lets say FY9013 and 9014 or so). Reasoning behind this approach is, we can capture all the transactions in each of those years, make all the entries and they close the year and move to the next one, with the balances.
Is this the right path? Also how would fixed asset depreciation behave, if we use these interim fiscal years? (We use Fixed asset module and we run depreciation for each month)
(other option was to extend the year 2012 through december 2012 and not create those interim years, but this bring more complexity to PM10 side).

I was hoping some one is out there, who had gone through this kind of acquisition, so i can exchange some emails to learn from the experience.
If you have any thoughts/ideas let me know

(Sujith)

[MUKUND]

Hi Sujith,

I would recommend the following approach

1. Create a new company to take the trial balance as on 8/17/2012(the Day after Merger). This new company should have its fiscal year as calendar year (the acuqiring company's fiscal year).
2. This will involve migration of open POs, SOs, Prod Orders, Service ORders, Projects (if any).
3.The old company with fiscal year ending June 2012 will stop having transactions after 8/16/2012.
4. The new company starts its First fiscal year with opening balances as on 8/17/2012.
5. Keeping data of earlier entity in a separate company will enable you to use it as a history company.

Good luck !

[SujithKumar]

Thanks Mukund.
We did consider that option, which is clean.
However it came with lot of overhead. We have lot of SQL reports/triggers and views, which all need to be changed with the new company.
Finally we decided to extend the year FY2012 all the way to Dec 2012 (ie an 18 month year)!