Year end close. Epicor did NOT forward opening balances to new year even though book was setup for auto update future balances

We are closing our first year since upgrading to 905.702A from Vantage8. We performed the steps for closing out the last period of 2016, and our BOOK is currently setup to auto-update future balances, but when we ran the income statment for period 1 of 2017 after we closed period 12 of 2016, we had a HUGE sales number for finished goods that looked like it was from the last 3 or 4 years worth of sales. However, I then ran the “transfer opening balance to next” process and selected 2016 to 2017, re-ran the income statement, and all seems good. My question is why didn’t the auto-update future balance thing work or did we do something incorrectly when closing out period 12 that caused it not to work. And what caused the crazy income statement numbers prior to running the transfer opening balance process? Does anyone know what “triggers” the auto-update future balance dea???