We have been using QuickBooks on a computer with the date format as DD-MMM-YYYY. As the file admin, I had set the closing date to 30-09-2022 (September, 30, 2022), meaning that we had closed the month of September 2022 and no user could change any record before that date. When Windows was reinstalled, we opened the company file on the same computer. The date format had been reset to MM/DD/YYYY, but I had confirmed that the computer system time and date were correctly set to 11/07/2022 (November 7, 2022). When I opened the company file, the closing date showed as 12-09-2022 (December 9, 2022), which is a future date, and I immediately got two errors that admin needed to enter the closing password to save a record (probably an automatic logging entry that the file was opened today). Moreover, nobody could add any transactions for today, let alone correct any errors in the month of October. When we changed the system date format to show 07-Nov-2022, then in fact the closing date showed as 30-09-2022 and October transactions could be changed plus today's transactions could be entered. The date format should NOT affect the actual closing date, and which transactions can be changed. Plus 12-09 (Dec 9) and 30-09 (Sep 30) can not even be misunderstood as the reverse of each other, so something else is going on.
In this case, we did not lose any integrity of data because the closing date was moved to a future date. However, if the date format were normally MM/DD/YYYY and somebody changed it to the one we use DD-MMM-YYYY, then it appears that the closing date would be changed to an earlier time and users could modify entries in a period that was already closed by the admin. This appears to me to be a security flaw.
We are using Quickbooks Desktop Premier 2020, Nonprofit edition.
I would appreciate a reply about whether this is a security flaw and what would be done about it.
