How to handle fiscal months?

Question

For me it's clear that fiscal years may have different start and end date compared to calendar years.

For example the fiscal year 2015 may begin on 2014-12-01 and end on 2015-11-30. The fiscal and calendar year have the same number of days (365).

But what's the best way to handle fiscal month?

When my fiscal months should begin on the 25th of the previous month, when does it end? For example for the fiscal month February 2015, the start date is January 25 and the end date could be

• February 24th. But then this month has 31 days, but the calendar month February 2015 has 28 days.
• February 22nd which has the same number of days (28) as the calendar month. But the the next month (March) begins on February 23rd

Answer 1

Fiscal months and years can be quite complex.

Some end on specific numbered day of the month. For others the day of the week is more important. See the wikie page for the 4-4-5 calendar

The 4–4–5 calendar divides a year into 4 quarters. Each quarter has 13 weeks, which are grouped into two 4-week "months" and one 5-week "month". The grouping of 13 weeks may also be set up as 5–4–4 weeks or 4–5–4 weeks, but the 4–4–5 seems to be the most common arrangement.

When a 4–4–5 calendar is in use, reports with month-by-month comparisons or trend over periods do not make sense because one month is 25% larger than the other two. However, you can still compare a period to the same period in the prior year, or use week by week data comparisons.

Its major advantages over a regular calendar are that the end date of the period is always the same day of the week, which is useful for shift or manufacturing planning, and that every period is the same length.

One disadvantage of the 4–4–5 calendar is that it has 364 days (7 days * 52 weeks), so that approximately every 5.6 years there will be a 53-week year, which can make year-on-year comparison difficult.

Some even pick the end of the calendar as the last Saturday of the month....