Fiscal year
Financial Accounting glossary · The Accounting Cycle & Financial Statements
Definition
Twelve-month period that an entity uses for financial reporting; need not coincide with the calendar year.
Fiscal year in plain English
A fiscal year is simply the 12-month stretch a company chooses as its official 'year' for adding up and reporting its finances. It doesn't have to run January to December like a calendar — a business can pick whatever start and end dates make sense for it. A ski resort, for example, might end its fiscal year in the summer so a single busy winter season sits neatly inside one reporting period instead of getting split in half. The point is to bundle a full cycle of the business into one clean chunk of time so the numbers tell a complete story.
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