Carry forward to next year

Manager does not actually require any action at the end of accounting periods. All your records will remain for as long as you use it. No summary accounts or closing entries are needed. To fit with typical expectations and produce common reports, however, you should do a couple things:

  1. On the Summary page, click the Set Period button at the top. Enter the start date of the new accounting period. Normally, leave the end date as “today.” Although Manager does not forget earlier entries, this has the effect of resetting all income and expense accounts to zero, just as though they had been closed out, as is done in other formal accounting systems. The advantage is that you can always go back and produce reports for earlier periods. Do nothing with permanent accounts, such as asset and liability accounts, so they carry forward automatically.

  2. In the Reports tab, create new reports for whichever types you use, such as the Profit and Loss Statement and the Balance Sheet. As you create them, enter the dates of the new accounting period. You can leave the earlier reports in place so you have convenient access to them. But you can always recreate them later, if necessary. In most cases, I create the new reports for the entire new year so I don’t need to edit the dates every time I want to look at one. (The heading will give the dates as the full year, even though no entries have been made past the current date.) Only if I needed to provide someone a formal report, such as when applying for a loan, would I edit the end date to something else.

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