Xero Lock Dates: How to Close a Period and Stop Your Numbers Moving

The Problem Lock Dates Solve

You lodge a BAS. Six weeks later your accountant asks why the GST on the lodged form does not agree to the Xero report for the same quarter. Nobody did anything obviously wrong. Someone reconciled an old bank line, someone else recoded a supplier bill that had been sitting in the wrong account, and a credit note was applied to an invoice from March.

Every one of those edits was reasonable. Together they moved a quarter you had already reported to the ATO.

Lock dates are the setting that stops this. They freeze a period so transactions dated on or before a chosen date cannot be added, edited, or deleted. It takes about thirty seconds to set and it eliminates an entire category of reconciliation problem.

The Two Lock Levels

Xero gives you two lock dates, and understanding the difference is the whole point.

Stop all users making changes on and before is the hard lock. Nobody can touch a transaction dated on or before this date. Not staff, not you, not your accountant, not your bookkeeper. To make a change, someone has to move the lock date, make the change, and move it back.

Stop all users except advisers making changes on and before is the soft lock. Users with the Adviser role can still post into the period. Everyone else is blocked.

Both live under Accounting, then Advanced, then Financial settings. You need the Adviser role to set them.

The normal pattern is to use both. Set the soft lock to the end of the most recently completed period so day to day users cannot backdate into it, while your accountant retains the ability to post genuine adjusting journals. Set the hard lock to the end of the last finalised financial year, once the tax return has been lodged and the accounts are signed off.

When to Set Each Lock Date

After Every BAS Lodgement

The moment a BAS is lodged, set the soft lock to the last day of that period. This is the highest value habit in this article. It means the figures you reported are the figures that stay reported.

If you lodge quarterly, that is four small actions a year. If you lodge monthly, add it to your month end routine.

After Month End Close

If you produce monthly management reports, lock the month once the reports have gone out. Otherwise the numbers you presented to a bank, a board, or a business partner will quietly drift away from what Xero says next time anyone opens the report.

After the Tax Return Is Lodged

Once the annual accounts are finalised and the return is lodged, set the hard lock to 30 June of that year. That period is now a matter of public record with the ATO. Nothing should move in it without a deliberate decision.

What Happens When Something Legitimately Needs to Change

It does happen. A supplier issues a credit note relating to a locked quarter. An error is found that materially misstates a lodged BAS. You have three options.

Post the correction in the current period. This is usually the right answer for small GST errors. The ATO allows many errors to be corrected on a later activity statement within specified limits rather than by revising the original. Your BAS agent can tell you whether your error qualifies.

Temporarily lift the lock, correct, and relock. Appropriate when the error is material and the period genuinely needs restating. Do it deliberately, document what changed and why, and put the lock straight back. Do not leave it open.

Post an adjusting journal dated in the open period. For accounting corrections that do not affect a lodged GST figure, a dated journal in the current period with clear narration is cleaner than reopening history.

The wrong answer is to leave the file permanently unlocked because reopening it is occasionally inconvenient.

Common Mistakes

Setting the lock too far forward. If the lock date is after transactions you still need to reconcile, your team will be blocked from normal work and will ask you to move it constantly. Lock completed periods only.

Forgetting the conversion balances period. When you migrate into Xero, lock everything on or before the conversion date. Nobody should ever be posting into pre migration history.

Assuming the lock covers everything. Lock dates control transaction dates, not everything in the file. Chart of accounts changes, contact record edits, and tracking category changes are not blocked by a lock date. If someone renames or archives an account, historical reports will present differently even though no transaction moved.

Giving everyone the Adviser role. A soft lock is worthless if every user is an adviser. Review your user list and make sure the Adviser role is limited to the people who genuinely need it, usually your accountant, your BAS agent, and possibly the business owner.

How This Fits With Automated Bookkeeping

Lock dates work best when the coding is already right by the time a period closes. If transactions sit uncategorised for weeks and only get sorted in a rush before a deadline, you will find yourself reopening periods regularly, and the discipline collapses.

Keeping categorisation current as transactions arrive is exactly what SortBooks does on top of your Xero file. When a quarter closes with the coding already done and reviewed, locking it is a formality rather than a decision you second guess.

The Thirty Second Version

Go to Accounting, then Advanced, then Financial settings. Set the adviser lock to the end of your last lodged BAS period. Set the hard lock to the end of your last finalised financial year. Update both as each new period closes.

That is it. It is one of the few Xero settings that costs nothing, takes almost no time, and removes a recurring problem permanently.