Year-End solutions

[David Brock]

IANAA, however:

I have thought a little about this "closing entries on a particular 
date" and in fact, I worked with an accounting system a long time ago, 
when I knew less about accounting that I barely do now.

The closing entries in that system- the zeroing transactions that moved 
all revenue and expense balances into retained earnings, were done in a 
special period called "99".  Basically, some arbitrary day in the 99th 
month of the year.  (as opposed to 12/31/YYYY, as Beth suggested)  
Obviously, it was used only for this purpose, as a date with that month 
would be non-sensical.  I suspect that the field was not a standard date 
field, or the date-authentication method n the program must have been 
over-ridden to include this as legitamite.

Presumably, there was a special case that could include or exclude that 
period, on any and/or all years, from reporting.  If the period was 
excluded in the report, then the multi-year reports will have meaning, 
but otherwise, the running balance on the Income Statement Accounts (rev 
& exp accounts), are cumulative for the year only, which is consistent 
with the need to close out the year in the first place.

FWIW,

;-David

Beth Leonard wrote:

>3) The method I decided to go with myself for this year is to create
>a new account branch -- Expenses -> 2004 Year End
>I took the totals for each category and manually added a transaction
>on 12/31/04 that moved the total for 2004 to that account.  The
>account report for that 2004 Year End register makes a nice summary
>of the information I'm interested in.  If you want pie graphs of
>your expenses, you just have to type in the date range from
>1/1/04 to 12/30/04, and hopefully there are no major expenses on
>12/31/04. [If someone knows of a better way to do this that wouldn't
>mess up my 2005 totals, I'd love the feedback.]
>  
>