[GNC] retained earnings in balance sheet: where does it come from?

[Adrien Monteleone]

Retained Earnings is posted when you perform a close book operation. (or manually zero your income/expense accounts to Equity)

If you didn’t do this for 2015, there would be no entry.

If you performed the 2016 close book operation in Jan 2017, you’ll have a retained earnings entry in that month for the net income-expenses for 2016. If you were a non-individual entity, that amount would be the entity’s taxable income for the year, hence the tax flag. You probably want to fix that date to 12/31/16.

Regards,
Adrien

> On Mar 9, 2019, at 10:44 AM, Andrea Borgia <andrea at borgia.bo.it> wrote:
> 
> Hi.
> 
> While splitting a multi-year book, I saw that the (end of) 2016 balance sheet has an entry called "retained earnings" with a value of 54.10.
> 
> A find-by-value gives me an entry in jan.2017 from an account which has a tax-related flag set (and can't be changed, too): am I correct in assuming the report is referring to this one? Also, why don't I see a similar entry in the 2015 balance sheet for the corresponding 53.80 entry involving the same accounts?
> 
> More to the point: can I just safely ignore it?
> After all, the total assets and the total equity match.
> 
> Thanks,
> Andrea.