[GNC] Best Practice - Year-End

[Stan Brown (using GC 4.14)]

On 2025-11-16 10:14, Mike Brasler wrote:
> In the past I have created a cumulative income and expense account and
> manually journalled every account to zero to end the year, allowing a
> zero balance to start the new.

I do that too. It is important to use a consistent Description line for
those entries, because one of the options for the Income Statement is to
ignore entries with a user-specified Description. Without that, every
income or expense account on your annual Income Statement would show
zero on your Income Statement.

> The advantage in this is that "learned" behavior such as expense
> allocations are remembered after rollover.
> 
> In my previous and much loved accounting system a one button click
> rolled over, but post closing journal entries were allowed. (NewAge
> Accounting for DOS)

You can make post-closing journal entries in GC too.They must have real
dates, like all entries; you can't use a fictitious date like Dec. 32.
Someone posted a few months back that they record every financial event
that happened on Dec. 31 with a date of Dec 30, reserving Dec. 31 for
closing and post-closing entries.

> Is there a preferred year-end procedure in GC?

In a word, no. Some are fans of "closing the books" at the end of every
year; others let the income and expense amounts mount up forever and use
the "Total (Period)" column in the accounts pane to get figures for
their current accounting period, or date ranges in reports to get
figures for any date range.

Neither method is objectively right or wrong; it comes down to personal
preference.

Stan Brown
Tehachapi, CA, USA
https://BrownMath.com