Public accountant question: prior year adjustments to retained earnings?

[John Ralls]

> On Mar 30, 2017, at 8:20 AM, Richard Games <richard at mycpas.ca> wrote:
> 
> Hello, I'm a public practice accountant in Canada and unfamiliar with Gnucash. I have tried to check the archies for this topic, but the archive were unavailable on the maillist site.
> 
> I have a client that has made entries in the prior year by accident. Therefore I need to make an adjustment to retained earnings.
> 
> When I go to the account that needs adjustment, all is fine, but I cannot find retained earnings within the listed accounts for the other side of the entry.
> 
> Two questions:
> Could someone please tell me how to locate retained earnings for journal entries?
> 
> Is there a general journal transaction entry screen - or do all entries have to be entered directly into the register of one of the accounts?

Unless your client has created a retained earnings account and run Actions>Close Book to populate it, there isn't one . The retained earnings line on the Balance Sheet report is calculated by summing all of the income and expense transactions up to the date of the report and subtracting the expenses total from the income total.

Yes, there's a general ledger register: Tools>General Ledger. Edit>Find when run from the Accounts page will also create a General Ledger register with only the matching transactions displayed.

GnuCash transactions are editable: Just fix the incorrect posted dates.

Regards,
John Ralls