Retained Earnings Prior Year

Mike or Penny Novack stepbystepfarm at mtdata.com
Sun Feb 13 17:09:25 EST 2011


Luis Watts wrote:

>Hello,
>
> 
>
>This may be more an accounting question than a GnuCash Question but I am
>trying to create a "Retained Earnings Prior Year" account and am stymied. I
>created the account then on 12/31 transferred "Opening Balance" to "Retained
>Earnings". But to make this correct I also need to transfer "Retained
>Losses" to this account but as "Retained Losses" is generated automatically
>by GnuCash I cannot access it to make the transfer. On 1/1 I intended to
>transfer my 12/31 "Retained Earnings" to "Prior Year Retained Earnings". Any
>suggestions? 
>  
>

Do your "close the books" manually.

Now you have full control of to where you close your income and expense 
accounts. I assume that what you want to do is have an ongoing record 
within the books for each year's net gain or loss. So you would create 
"child" accounts under equity. Perhaps a child named something like 
"retained gains and losses from prior years" and under this children for 
each year (so you can see each year and the parent total will be the sum 
of all the years)

The automatic "Retained Earnings" you are seeing is because you haven't 
yet closed the books (it's the net total of all income and expense 
accounts so when after "close the books" those are all reset to zero, so 
will it.

Michael


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