What is the Best Practice for Creating Variance Period Recs for Summary Reconciliations?

Summary: When new summary reconciliations are requested, we need to create the summary reconciliation for the current period and the variance period, otherwise, the variance period balance will not pull through into the current period's summary reconciliation. Is there a best practice for how to do this each time? Whenever we have to create a new summary reconciliation, we end up re-opening the locked variance period, creating the summary reconciliation in the variance period, auto-closing the summary reconciliation in the variance period, and re-locking the variance period. This is all done just to ensure the variance period balance shows up on the current period's summary reconciliation. Is there a better way to get the variance period balance to show up on