End of Year Accounting procedures

[MICHAEL LEWIS]

Normal accounting practice at the end of year is to archive transactions of the year just ended and start the new year's ledger with just a brought forward figure. There are of course varying practices, but in general it is undesirable to clog up current files with ever increasing numbers of transactions.
How do other users deal with the problem of dropping past years' transactions at the start of a new year? The FAQs section is not very forthcoming.
Michael Lewis